Exile of the Soul - Mitchell

8/14/2019 Exile of the Soul - Mitchell

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[[The Exile of the Soul was first serialized in the CanadianTheosophist, Jan., 1929 - Feb., 1930 under Mitchell's pen nameof "Zadok." See postscript for a short bio of Mitchell.]]

THE EXILE OF THE SOULBy Roy Mitchell

CHAPTERS:

I. The Biological ProblemII. The Psychological ProblemIII. The Mathematical ProblemIV. The Philosophical ProblemV. The Mystical ProblemVI. The Theological ProblemVII. The Mythological ProblemVIII. The Ethical Problem

IX. The Humanist Problem

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I. THE BIOLOGICAL PROBLEM

Biology, ancient as well as modern, has taken count of threeclasses of phenomena. The first are the phenomena of thethinking soul. These are the noetic functions. The fact thatmodern biological writers call them psychic should deceivenobody. It only means that some writer looking in a lexicon

for a Greek word for soul took the first word he found,"psyche", regardless of its suitability. If he had been abetter thinker he would have kept on until he found the word"nous" which means thinking or rational soul. Psyche meansthe animal or irrational soul. The second class of phenomenaare those of animate nature. Just where animate nature endsand inanimate nature begins is still a matter of doubt tobiologists. By animate they describe whatever lies betweennoetic and physico-chemical phenomena. In the bestterminology these functions would be called psychic. Thebiologist, a little off key as usual, calls them vital. Vitalis a word that, as we shall see, has other connotations. Itis however, the accepted name for a series of phenomena, and,

in the form "vitalist", stands for a school of opinion, and Ishall have to use it. The third class of phenomena are thephysico-chemical ones of the so-called inanimate nature.

Biologists, ancient and modern, are regimented according tothe way in which they view these classes, the way in whichthey group them and the relative importance they assign tothem.

Animists are those who give first importance to theintelligent soul but deny the separate existence of the



psychic or vital functions. These latter they say are no morethan lower, unconscious functions of the noetic power.Recognizing thus only soul and body they declare that the bodyis directly guided and controlled by the thinking soul. As ascientific theory of life animism is comparatively recent.Its great exponent was the German physiologist Stahl (1660-1734). After his death it was continued by some of his pupilsand had a revival in the last century under E. Chauffard. It

is the theory of life most easily aligned with theology, andhas been largely influenced by theological considerations.

Monism is the opposite pole. It is like animism in thatnoetic and psychic functions are confused and identified. Itdiffers from animism in that its followers give firstimportance to the body. Monists in addition to confusingthought and feeling, commit the further error of assimilatingall phenomena, psychic and noetic, to general forces in naturewhich govern plants and animals. They tend to deny theexistence of individual souls. In the beginning of modernscience the monistic or mechanistic biologists saw the body asa complex of chemical apparatus, of pipes, pumps, retorts,

levers, etc., etc., and interpreted soul as an illusiongrowing out of the activity of these. They have graduallyapproximated more closely to vitalism with the difference thatthey call the vital factors directional ones, and deny themactual entity. Monism corresponds to the Charvaka school ofancient and modern India. Biological monism is a reactionfrom theology.

The third possible position is called vitalism. It takescount of the three classes of phenomena, noetic, psychic - andphysico-chemical, as entitled to separate consideration. Itsays there is a vital (or psychic factor) between the thinkingsoul and the physical body by means of which the body is

governed and directed.

In modern times vitalism arose out of the obvious failure ofthe animistic doctrine of Stahl, and has numbered among itsexponents Borden, Grimaud, Barthez, Johannes Muller, Liebig,Candolle the botanist, Flourens and Dressel. Its origin,however, as a theory of life goes back into furthestantiquity. It is the doctrine of the oldest occult schools,of religions at their inception, of the mystery systems, andis taught by Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato, Aristotle, theNeoPlatonists, Galen, Paracelsus, Van Helmont, Agrippa andothers. Vitalism is neither a leaning towards nor a reactionfrom theology but has maintained its course regardless of

current fashion.

The great objection the vitalists bring against animism is thephilosophical one that animism requires the impossibleconception of the thinking soul acting directly on thematerial body. Vitalists argue that the functions of the soulare reflective, volitional and conscious whereas the phenomenaof the body are automatic, involuntary and unconscious. Theonly means of communication, they declare, can be through avital principle which is distinct from thought.



Although the intentions of the animists and the monists arediametrically opposed, say the vitalists, their conclusionsare particularly identical. The animist throws down allbarriers between thinking and feeling. The monist destroysthe barriers between feeling and physiological action. Theanimist posits a soul that performs all functions from thehighest intuitional ones down to the lowest gleam ofconsciousness observable in plant and animal life. The monist

posits a body that can by physico-chemical action explain allfunctions from the simplest chemical ones up to (and for somemonists including) the functions of thought. They both -excluding the utter mechanists of course - have a spiritualprinciple which animates all living creatures and both schoolshave a body which is purely materialistic. The disputebetween them is which is the cause and which the effect. Doesthe thinking soul of man merely clothe itself with a body itdoes not understand, or does the body generate a kind ofmotion which is to be understood as mind?

Neither, says the vitalist. Pythagoras taught that betweennous, the thinking soul, and soma, the body, there is a

feeling or sensitive soul which he called psyche. Plato saysthere can be no understanding of man until we have made thedifference between the divine rational soul which is immortaland the irrational soul which is mortal. Aristotleenunciating the ideas of his time took count of nous, theintellectual soul, and psyche, the irrational or vegetativesoul. The Egyptian priests had a passional or desire soulwhich they called _ab-hati_ standing between the immortalsoul, the ba, and the body or _chat._ The Hindu schools havea thinking soul, Jivatma (the living, divine principle) orantahkarana (the cognitive soul) and a body called _Sthulasharira._ Between the soul and body they have an animal soulcalled _Kamarupa._ Their symbol for the thinking soul is

Vishnu and for the animal soul, Shiva.

Galen, physician to Marcus Aurelius, and the medical writerwhose system continued in Europe until the Renaissance, tookcount of (1) mind, (2) what he called animal, vital andnatural spirits, and (3) body. Paracelsus, the reformer ofmediaeval medicine taught the existence of a (1) thinkingsoul, (2) the Olympic spirits or vital, forces of animal life,and (3) the body. Van Helmont the alchemist, physician andphilosopher was a vitalist and refused to admit that the souldirectly directs the body. The gap between soul and body hefilled with a sensitive or feeling soul ruling a hierarchy ofentities that correspond to the animal-vital natural series of

Galen and to the Olympic spirits of Paracelsus.

In the ranks of modern biologists, the monists, whose greatemphasis is on body and bodily function are vastly in themajority. The animists have dwindled to a mere handful. Thevitalists remain but are widely different in theirallegiances. At one pole are those who maintain an animisticvitalism that almost loses the vital principle in the thinkingsoul. At the other are those who maintain a monistic vitalismwhich almost loses the vital principle in the physiologicalprocesses.



The steady trend of modern biology is, however, in thedirection of vitalism and as experimentation goes on there areincreasing analogies for, and demonstrations of, the existenceof a lesser soul and of whole ranges of souls inferior to thatagain, as the occultists have always contended. In commonwith the other sciences which are gradually turning back tothe older philosophies and vindicating occult theories,

biology is returning to a vitalist theory of man through whatis called pluri-vitalism.

Pluri-vitalism is the secondary doctrine we saw in Galen,Paracelsus and Van Helmont. These occultists argued that thefunctions of the body are governed by a multitude of lives,cellular, corpuscular and organic. Galen's doctrine of threekinds of spirits was that the animal spirits preside over thenervous system, the vital spirits govern most of the otherfunctions and that the natural spirits regulate the liver andcan be incorporated thus in the blood. Paracelsus' Olympicspirits, which, as we shall see, derive their names from theearth gods of the Greek Olympus, are forces peculiarly of this

earth stream of evolution, and control the functions of theliver, heart and brain. They exist also, says Paracelsus, inall other living forms of nature. Van Helmont, in placingbelow the thinking immortal soul a sensitive mortal soul, gavethe sensitive soul as its agent an _aura vitalis_ or principal_archaeus_ (the Hindu _prana,_ and the true vital element).This latter he says has its seat at the pylorus, or orificethat empties the stomach. Below this again Van Helmont placedthe lesser individual lives he called _blas_ or _vulcans_ ineach organ. The Kabbalists, the Egyptians, the Alchemists andall ancient schools placed the seat of the true psyche orfeeling soul in the heart and said that its fluid vehicle, bywhich it pervades the body, is the blood. This is, by the

way, the reason for the Jewish practice of slaughtering a foodanimal in such a way as to bleed it.

It was the fashion a generation ago to ridicule theseclassifications. Experiment has shown, however, that they area valid terminology for phenomena since demonstrated. It haslong been known that the lowest creatures are complete livesin their various parts. Plants propagated by cuttings haveall the qualities of their parental stock. Worms cut intomany parts complete themselves. In 1901 at Turin thebiologist Locke kept the heart of a rabbit alive for severalhours. Since then the heart of a man has been kept beatingeighteen hours after the man's death. The experiments have

been continued with muscles, glands, cells, tissues, nerves,the brain itself, demonstrating the old belief that each organand each lesser centre of life has a separate existence. Inthe phrase of the Montpellier vitalist, Bordeu, each part ofthe body is "an animal in an animal."

The body of man is therefore the field of activity of a vastnumber of beings of whom the soul is only one - albeit thehighest and capable of becoming the governing one. Thethinking soul is the potential ruler of a great colony ofentities extending from a sensitive soul or psyche down to the



lowest cell life. The mechanistic biologist is loath to callthese lesser lives entities. The furthest he will go is tocall them vital properties, but the march of discovery isforcing him back to the idea that each, as a spiritual entity- however low its manifestation - is a fiery life. Moreoverhe is being driven by analogous advances in psychology andphysics to realize that the co-ordination of these - sofrequently inimical to each other - is not the work of the

thinking soul but of a soul below the level of ourconsciousness. The present fashion in biology is to refuse toconsider the vital soul as an active agent. A trifle afraidof each other, biologists take refuge in evasive sayings.They say it is a directional factor, an "ideal plan in theprocess of being carried out". Which of course entails theconcept of an Ideal Planner, a sort of diffuse and non-individualized God, who only enters His plan as a vague forceor energy. They argue that the vital properties in each organare modes of activity inherent in the living substance andthat these modes are derived from the arrangement of themolecules of the substance. Whether the arrangement isfortuitous, as the chemists have held, or is the careful work

of the divine Molecule-Arranger they cannot agree. That thePlanner and Molecule-Arranger might enter His plan as manyindividual souls - however humble - would be mythological andpagan. It might land them before their university senates oncharges of pantheism or even witchcraft.

It will be observed in all the foregoing, the confusion arisesout of the problem of the thinking soul. Thousands ofphenomena show that it is not the efficient governor of thebody. It knows nothing of the normal functioning of theorgans. The beating of the heart, the coursing of blood, thechemistry of the conversion of food into renewed tissue, theexpansion and contraction of the lungs, the processes of

glandular secretion, the peristaltic action of the intestines,all go on without us. If the noetic soul were the directruler and knower of these functions we should have no occasionfor debate about them. The proof that the thinking soul isexternal to these activities is to be found in the fact thatit is unconscious of them.

Even the phenomena of death do not, for the vitalist, requirethe soul. Death for the animist is the withdrawal of thethinking soul. Death for the monist is the breakdown of themachine. For the vitalist death is the withdrawal of theanimal entity. Withdrawal of the noetic soul alone, while thepsychic entity survives, is insanity.

Man minus a thinking soul would be a problem completelyassimilable to all the problems of animal life. Hisintroduction into the animal scheme renders the latterabnormal. The early animists, when pressed for an explanationof the fact that the soul could do so little with the physicalfunctions, borrowed from theology a reply which theology hadlong ago borrowed from occult philosophy and said, "The soulis prevented by the consequences of original sin from guidingand directing the body."



Despite the ridicule the answer it elicited contained a clueto the solution of the problem. The animal order to which thehuman body belongs is a symmetrical and ordered whole - astream of lives proceeding according to a plan. The thinkingsoul is the anomaly. It is the governor who does not govern.It is the deluded being who does not know the nature of itsown forces. It is the thinker that now identifies itself withgovernance and now realizes its impotence. It is the thinker

that cannot determine between these three - the soul as thedirector of the body, the body as the creator of the soul, orthe soul as the co-inhabitor with a lower entity of a bodywhich is itself the creation of a great number of still lowerlives. The whole confusion is brought about, seemingly, bythe effort of the thinker to identify himself with an order ofbeings to which he does not belong.

When we understand the thinker in man as an onlooker, and thereal present ruler of the body as a sensitive and passionalsoul, the confusion begins to clear.

II. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM

So much for the demonstrations contained in hypnoticsuggestion. The hypothesis of unconscious mind as a lowerentity is also the explanation of autosuggestion in its formsof Christian Science, faith-healing, habit-curing and mentaltherapeutics. The reason why the hypnotist is more successfulthan the Ego himself in making the lower being do what he istold, is that the hypnotist is detached and has no sentimentalor habitual misgivings. He is a successful hypnotist because

he does not change his mind.

It is the explanation - and H. P. Blavatsky offered it half acentury ago - of the phenomena of the seance room. The lowerentity - the elemental or animal soul - is, in the vastmajority of cases, the visitant who floods psychic literaturewith his puerile recollections of earth and his ante-mortemtheories of post-mortem states. Just as we saw him in thehypnotist's laboratory, he cannot, after death, reasoninductively. He can offer fragmentary memories or corroboratewhat the sitters put into his mind. This is why a _revenant_can create the externals of a disembodied entity but can sorarely transcend the automatisms of earth life. He is the

animated _bhuta_ or _pisacha_ of Eastern occultism, the shellof Theosophical literature.

Freud's psychoanalytic system, which owes far more tomediaeval and Renaissance occultists than its author mightcare to admit, offers valuable testimony to the independentexistence of the lower soul, and the active part it plays indemanding from the Ego the intellectual reinforcement it needsfor the fulfilment of its desires. The Ego - Freud's"censor" - is not only the creator of ideas for his own use,but he is also most frequently the creator of ideas that have



no other purpose than the satisfaction of the desires of thelower being. This is the reason for the desire-saturation ofthe elements in the subconscious realm of mind, the ideas thathave slipped out of the Ego's field of conscious knowledge andform the reservoir of animal mind in man. The fact thatFreud, misreading his data, proposes an animal ethic for thedivine soul, only demonstrated that psychologists, like othermen, do not know what to do with facts when they get them.

Behaviorism, the _enfant terrible_ of modern psychology, isfor the most part a study of the relation of the animal soulto the body. It disagrees with occult science in the same waythat all materialistic science does, and proceeds on theassumption that bodies are real and soul is not. It says thatthe body of man by its muscular reflexes and visceraltwitchings begets the illusion of all higher faculties. Evenmisinterpreted thus, the Behaviorist data are valuable to thestudent. Watson's identification of emotions and powers withspecific centres in the body is a restoration of the ancientdoctrine of the body as a mirror of soul-function. Like somany other schools of psychology, however, Behaviorism

survives by denying the existence of phenomena its theory willnot explain. It offers a plausible theory of living personsbut it gets into trouble when it is confronted with theproblems of dead persons, and with the other psychologicalphenomena of seance rooms. Behaviorists know they will neverpersuade anybody that visceral twitchings in the present bodycan continue in an after world after the physical viscera haveceased to twitch. Neither can it say with authority thatvisceral twitchings in the medium enable her to know thatsomebody's deceased mother's cousin was named Edward. Nobodywants to be a failure, so, rather than fail, Behaviorismrepudiates psychic phenomena altogether.

It has become apparent to the student of occult philosophythat the principal cause of the psychologist's quandary is hisrefusal to admit the materiality of any other planes than thephysical. The Eastern psychologist has no such problem. Forhim the world of desire or Kama is a definite realm of matterinterior to and interpenetrating the highest state of physicalmatter as water interpenetrates a solid. His world of mind ormanas is a still subtler plane interior to the plane of desireand interpenetrating it and the physical planes as airinterpenetrates liquids and solids. Interior to all these isa still subtler plane of radiant matter called Buddhi, thatstands in the same relation to the three below it as lightdoes to gases, liquids and solids. A soul in Eastern

psychology is an essence, a Jiva, as immaterial as the Westernscientist would ask, but possessed of the power of manifestingin any of the planes - in the radiant world of Buddhi as acognitive spiritual being, in manas as an intellective, form-making creator, in kama as a sensitive, feeling soul, as thesouls of animals are. The fundamental fact about him is thathe is not the plane in which he operates. He is spirit; itis matter. In all of which the Eastern psychologist may be aswrong as Newton and Dalton were and still he might supplyWestern psychology with a working hypothesis.



The identification of consciousness or awareness exclusivelywith mind is an absurdity and responsible for the absurditiesin which psychology is enmeshed. The Ego is obviously a beingmaking forms in mind. Quite as obviously the lower entity isanother being living a passional life in the realm below mindand borrowing his intellectual elements from a Jiva who is forsome reason his instructor. The sodden, forgotten worldbetween the two is the debris of lives of incompetent and mis-

used instruction. Subconscious mentality is a disorderlytangle of forms on which Ego and animal draw at will. Whenyears ago Dr. Maudsley reproved science for forgetting thatall external objects are really seen within us, he voiced hiscelebrated witticism, "A thing is a think". Psychology willget out on to _terra firma_ again when it learns to say "Athink is also a thing."

In the meantime Goelenius the unskillful word-searcher isbeing justified. Psychologists are devoting themselves lessand less to the thinking soul which must ever eludematerialistic science, and are resigning its study to themetaphysicians. More and more they are devoting their

inquiries to the feeling soul - the true psyche - whichbecause it is external to man is capable of being studied inthe objective manner of science. Gradually they are isolatingit, describing it and revealing it as conformable to theanimal world from which occult science says the Ego has liftedit. At the same time the true Ego withdraws and day by daybecomes more definitely the anomaly he is - a visitor in aworld that is not his own. The question is, "What is his trueworld?"

III. THE MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM

Something peculiarly enlightening for the student of theoccult sciences has occurred in these recent years of thesteady materialization of thought under the influence ofpositive science. There has been a revolution againstmaterialism and strangely enough the rebel has been the mostexact of all scientists - indeed the only scientist who hasnever had a doubt cast upon his exactitude - themathematician.

The mathematician has been the factotum of his fellow, and

less scientific, scientists. They brought him their sums todo. They enlisted him to work out their formula. Theyengaged him to impart to their young men enough of his scienceto enable them to carry on the simpler operations of theirown. He was a sort of slave-pedagogue, regarded as vague andunpractical in his preoccupations but none the less useful.

The mathematician has always been more or less of a mystic.He is constantly engaged in meditation on abstractions likethose archetypal ideas of Plato's. The nature of his workcompels him to remember what less scientific inquirers forget,



that all the major assumptions of scientific research areintuitions and are unprovable by mental process. He is usedto remembering that the mind of the seeker, while it is aninstrument, is none the less in itself a severe limitation.The mathematician knows that you can never have a scienceuntil you have posited a number of things you are entirelyincapable of proving. These he calls axioms. If he is a bitshaky about whether his intuition is accurate he is honest and

calls them postulates. Consciousness, for example, is anaxiom. Space is only a postulate. So is time. Matter isonly a postulate. Motion is a postulate. The mathematicianis strict. If he is not it must show in his result.

I have said the exponents of positive science bring theirformula to the mathematician for solution, and like the goodauditor he is, he reproves the evils of their book-keeping.He objects, for instance, to their trick of trying to explainone unknown by another. When, to take a classical example,they say motion is change in the relations of matter, and whenthey are then asked what matter is, they say matter is thefield in which motion makes changes, the mathematician is

reproachful. He reminds them that they cannot define onepostulate by another.

They can get nowhere, he has reminded them, until they make uptheir minds on the whole subject of knowledge. What isknowable? What is not knowable? How is anything knowable?He does not demand with Berkeley that they believe only inconsciousness and deny that anything has actual existenceoutside of the spectator's idea of it. Neither would he letthem take their stand with Buchner and Haeckel and go to theextreme of saying that matter and motion are the only truthand that consciousness is merely a sensation arising out oftheir operation.

The mathematician votes with Kant. He says the only soundposition is the critical one - that each of us is aconsciousness, that there exists outside of us a world ofcauses. A tree is something that causes me to think of atree, but a real tree is vastly different from what I think itis and if I do not know all about a tree, it is because I havenot brought to bear on it an adequate perceptive equipment.Or as the occultist would say, I am not seeing the tree on ahigh enough plane to know its high plane truths. Or asOuspensky has stated it in his _Tertium Organum,_ it is notbecause I have a confused perception of a real world, butbecause I have a very acute perception of an entirely unreal

world. Or again, as Hinton would have said it, I am notseeing a real tree but the thinnest possible three-dimensionalsection of a real tree. Or as Kant would have said, thespace-sense I bring to bear on the tree is inadequate; it isa limitation of my mind. In the far older _Voice of theSilence_ the parallel saying is, "Mind is the great slayer ofthe real."

The modern restoration of the idea that our sense of a three-dimensional world is not ultimate, begins with Kant. Hisphilosophical successors promptly lost the idea or never knew



he had it. His mystical successors carried it on. Theacademic philosopher's ideas only have to be accurate enoughto get into a book or a student's notes. The mathematician'sand the mystic's ideas have to work. K.F. Gauss and N.I.Lobachevsky were the first continuators. Then came C.H.Hinton, who in a remarkable series of works developed amechanism of cubes for the education of the space-sense. Hedeclared that diagrams on paper were quite useless because the

solid itself being a symbol, the diagram is a symbol of asymbol. His mechanism is an equipment of colored cubes bywhich to make the transition from three-space into four-spaceperceptions. After Hinton the most notable figure in the,same phase of the inquiry has been the Russian P.D. Ouspenskywho has worked out a remarkable relation of the ideas of two-,three-, and four-space consciousness to mysticism andoccultism. More recently and in the field of physics,Einstein, Eddington and their group have made the mathematicalformula that demonstrate the concept of time as being alimited understanding of a fourth way in space. They havealso developed Kant's relation of the observer to the objectobserved, into their theory of relativity.

For my present purpose I require only the straightest linethrough the subject.

The line represents one-dimensional space. It is generated bythe motion of a point. It has no "up or down" and no"across". It has only "along". A line moved in a directionat right angles to its length generates a surface. It has thedimensions of length and breadth l but no "up and down", nothickness. This is two-space. A surface moved in a directionand breadth generates a solid. This is three space. Can thissolid - imagine it a cube - be moved in a fourth directionwhich is none of the three others but perpendicular to all of

them and thus generate a four-space shape - a tesseract?

Mind cannot grasp it. The positive scientist saysemphatically, "No." Mathematicians say "Yes, it is puzzlingand paradoxical but we must say it can." There is a dimensionof space (perhaps several) that eludes our mental space-sensebut is none the less real on that account. It is probablymore real than our limited mental concept".

The mathematician has a constantly recurring problem. When aphysicist, let us say, brings the mathematician a sum to do,and it is one that involves linear dimensions carried intosurfaces, the mathematician writes alongside and above the

quantity a little 2-x[2] - meaning the quantity is to besquared. If it is a problem running into solids, themathematician writes x[3]. But occasions arise when he mustwrite x[4]. You can imagine a colloquy between themathematician and his client. The physicist says:

"But there is no such thing as four ways in space."

"I am sorry," says the mathematician, "but there are theprocesses. I'd like to make the result easier for you but Icannot tell a lie."



"But I cannot imagine such a thing."

"That is a defect certainly," says the mathematician, "but itis your defect. The calculation is all right."

Which is precisely what Kant said. Mind shackles us to anadequate concept of the world and therefore precludes our

knowing the truth about it.

Hinton said that by observation and reflection we can knowthree dimensions. By intuition we can know four dimensions.This intuition he called direct apprehension. It has beencalled by the occultist direct cognition, and is said to be anattribute of Buddhi, the fourth level of the manifested world,and the plane next above Manas or mind, which is the third.In his posthumous book, _A New Era of Thought,_ Hinton has,curiously enough, related this direct apprehension of four-space to love and sympathy and brotherhood - which are alsoattributes of Buddhi and the indications are that hisrealization of the relation arose out of his own experience as

he developed by means of his cubes the power of seeing thetesseract.

After Hinton came Ouspensky who built on Hinton, but carriedthe experiments into many other fields. The phase of hisresearch that means most to us at the present moment, is thatwhich has to do with the higher animals. Ouspensky says thedog and the horse, for instance, have no consciousness ofthree-space. All their actions in and reactions to the worldaround them show that they are under a two-space limitation.They see the same objects - or causes - as we do but theycannot convert what they see into three dimensions. Headvances a great many demonstrations of this. For most of

them I must refer the reader to his _Tertium Organum._

Ouspesky's work stirred resentment and unbelief among somelovers of animals. They were chiefly the people whoanthropomorphize their pets and attribute to animals thoughtprocesses like their own. They believed it involved somedegradation of the animal to impute to it a limited spacesense. The better animal lovers welcomed a profound insightinto age-old problems of animal behavior. It offered theexplanation of why a dog, going round an unfamiliar tree, forexample, is startled when he sees a previously unseen branchand swerves as if the tree had thrust it out at him suddenlyin hostile demonstration. His master knowing a third

dimension of trees knows that the branch extends another wayin space and has been there all the time. Ouspensky offersthe only valid explanation of dogs barking at the turningwheels of vehicles in the notion that they are alive. Heexplains also the animal's inability to use the principle ofthe lever, a fundamental mechanism of all three dimensionalconcepts.

Occult science offers a continuation of Ouspensky's thesis.It says that the Ego is living in the body of an animal and iscompelled to see the world through the sensory and sensational



mechanism of an animal. It will be unnecessary, therefore, togo to the dog and the horse for assurance of the two-dimensionality of animal consciousness. If what Ouspenskysays is true, the whole series of phenomena will be observablein the complex of organisms which we call man. If allknowledge of the physical world must pass to the Ego throughthe eyes and consciousness of an animal nature, there must bea stage in every percept when it will be two dimensional.

And is it not so? The reader must test it for himself. Ourfirst view of everything is two dimensional. We see asurface. Depth, the third dimension, has to be reasoned outby an effort of thought. Look at the molding on the door orwindow before you. It appears as a flat surface with lightand shade. You examine it more carefully and analyze theshadows into a third dimension, saying, "It goes back there,it comes forward here, it curves towards, it curves away."Pick up a perspective drawing in, let us say, a text book ofsolid geometry, or look at a mechanical drawing in line. Itpresents itself at first as an arrangement of lines on asurface. Then you reason it out, setting back this plane and

advancing that one, recognizing this as receding, that asapproaching, this plane as foreground, that as middle ground,a third as distance. Or wakes up in an unfamiliar or halflighted room and watch the tricks your animal vision will playon you before you resolve the flat impressions into theirsuccessive planes by effort of will. Or, come around thecorner and see unexpectedly a coat thrown over a chair andobserve how you start like the dog did as he ran around thetree, until your mind asserts itself and assures you there isnothing hostile in what at first seemed so. You say in suchcases that you got a start. Of course you did not. Theanimal got a start.

Evidently Hinton left out a step. His formula should havebeen: By observation we know two-space; by reflection weknow three-space; by direct apprehension we know four-space.

Let us return now to the direct apprehension of four-dimensionality. Is it a function of a higher soul than thethinking soul we identify with ourselves, or is it a higherfunction of the thinking soul? Hinton's experiments proveconclusively, and so do Ouspensky's, as also do those ofEinstein, the apprehension of objects in their four-dimensionality, is the removal of a limitation. It is afunction of the soul in a level just above mind. When Hintonsets about his space-education discipline, he shows that the

vision comes first in glimpses that can be made increasinglypermanent. Each time he wants to make the transition intofour-space, he starts by making the transition from two-spaceto three-space as a means of knowing what the three to fourtransition would be. The two-space to three-space transitionis easy because we make it more or less unconsciously everyminute of the day. Since the transition from two-to three isa resumption each time of a power of thought we have longpossessed, the transition from three to four is similarly aresumption. It is not a new acquirement but a renewal of anold power.



We are back again with the occultists! Occult science takescount of seven dimensions in space, of which The Divine Ego,by virtue of evolution in past world periods has made himselfmaster of four. In his present anomalous state of limitationand bewilderment he has "fallen" from his four-dimensionalconsciousness into a three-dimensional one. Presently, theoccult traditions say, unless he consolidates his forces and

reasserts his divinity he can fall another stage and comeunder the limitation of two-dimensionality.

Two dimensions mark the present apex of the evolution of theanimal soul. The dog cannot himself make the transition fromtwo to three. Two are for him what four seem to be for us.(I offer here because it will come up later, the suggestionthat the Ego has really touched a fifth dimension in his pastbut has not fully mastered it.) Our task, the occulttradition would indicate, is to help the animal soul to makehis necessary transition into the three-space consciousness ofmind. We must first recover our own apex and then lift him.We cannot stand still. If we will not go up we must go down.

The descent into Avernus manifests itself in its incipientstages as psychism, which, unless it is resisted, mustdegenerate into two-space consciousness. The psychic is onewho cannot resolve his perceptions into their necessaryplanes, either of time or of space. With this process ofdegeneration I shall deal more fully later in the series.

Here then is another contribution to the necessary picture ofthe Exile in his relation to the worlds above and below him.Again his position is anomalous. He sees surfaces, he thinksthem into solids. He could go on and resolve them into vastlymore potent four-space forms but he faints and grows weary.He is the user of a power of vision above that of the animal

in which he dwells and is the possessor of a dormant power ofvision higher than that he uses. Resumption of his highvision does not seem to wait on evolution or any cyclicprocess. It seems to be available when the Ego wills it. Theanimal soul, on the other hand, is a creature of cycles. Itis evolving. Is this perhaps what the Secret Doctrine meanswhen it says the Ego is not evolving; it has emanated?

IV. THE PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM

We have seen how, in the latter half of the nineteenthcentury, psychology, attracted by the glittering beginnings ofscientific research, deserted the field of philosophy for thatof positive science and came thereby under limitations thathave made it almost unworkable. The other branches ofphilosophy could not so readily change to a materialisticbasis and they have remained more or less in their originalfield of subjective research, but they too have been affectedby the scientific fashion. They have assumed the name of "thephilosophical sciences". They define their province as the



coordination and synthesis of the results of scientificresearch. That is, they have been persuaded that the interioror subjective method is no longer good enough, because realitylies outside us. They become, therefore, the servants ofexternal reality. The modern philosopher proudly callshimself the "critic of the sciences," and, as inevitablyhappens when a man devotes himself exclusively to thecriticism of the product of others, he ceases to produce in

his own right.

The philosopher's position would be superb if he could sit instate and have the scientist bring results to him forcriticism. But a scientist does not quite see the necessityfor a philosopher at all. The scientist is quite confident hecan do his own criticizing. And so, within the rules of hisenquiry, he can. At last with no business coming in, thephilosopher goes looking for business and ends up in the orbitof a scientist who has his eye fixed to the end of amicroscope. When a few philosophers, all in quest ofbusiness, have gathered, they find nothing to talk about butwhether the microscope-man can believe his eye. The

idealistic monists contend that what he sees is all in hismind. The materialistic monists ask "What is he himself butthe sort of thing he sees under the microscope?" The realityis in the object. The seer is an illusion arising out of themotion of the parts of the object. The critical realists, whoas we have seen before have a high position - Kant's - if theywish to take it, content themselves with a compromise and tryto steer a peaceable middle course.

Am I flippant about it? Here is a modern philosopher statingit in more dignified terms. It is Professor A.S. Pringle-Pattison speaking:

"Subject-object, knowledge, or, more widely, self-consciousness, and its implicates - this unity in duality - isthe ultimate aspect which duality presents. It has generallybeen considered, therefore, as constituting in a special sensethe problem of philosophy. Philosophy may be said to be theexplication of what is involved in this relation."

This is the present state of the art of Pythagoras and Plato,of Kapila, of Sankaracharya, of Nagarjuna, of Aryasangha, ofPlotinus, of Kant, and all the line of the lovers of wisdom.It has been said, not once but many times, these recent years,that formal philosophy has reached the most arid,unserviceable and generally contemptible era in its history.

Professor Pringle-Pattison's definition of the crux of modernphilosophy is the sterile modern form of what once was thegreat fertile problem of epistemology, the theory ofknowledge. The ancient philosopher asked, "How does knowledgecome into the world?" The immediate and inferior answer is,"Through the senses." Such an answer will not stand the testof the commonest experience. We are all conscious ofknowledge not traceable to what we have seen or heard. Apartfrom visions in dreams, which might be recollections ofsomething we have seen but have forgotten, we have tendencies,



aptitudes, capacities which are themselves a sublimated formof knowledge. If playing the piano after long training is anearned aptitude, the capacity to play the piano without anytraining in this life can only be an earned aptitude.Precocious genius is a kind of knowledge not traceable toknown experience. So the philosopher, articled to thescientist, who is in his turn articled to the doctrine of theexclusive reality of an outside world, falls back on the idea

of heredity and says some ancestor earned the aptitude. Theseknowledge-powers, he says, are transmitted from generation togeneration. This is the Plan of the Universe.

It may be true, but at the best it is an inefficient Plan, andin nowise to be compared to the other processes of nature.For one thing, too many of the wisest of mankind do nottransmit at all, and when they do so it is with the poorestresults. Almost all of mankind transmit at a time when theywould seem to have the least worth transmitting. The valuableexperience of all of them is at its greatest worth long afterthey have ceased transmitting. Too many make no use of whathas been transmitted, and too many destroy it with

counteractive energies. Added to which the scientist is nowsatisfied that acquired characteristics cannot be transmittedanyway. What escaped these abysses of inadvertence is calledheredity. This seems to be the Plan. A more incompetent onecould scarcely have been conceived. A Greek or Hinduphilosopher would be ashamed to entertain it even for amoment. It neglects the one factor of which the philosopher -or anybody else for that matter - can be sure, the factor ofsoul. But this man of ours, having become a critic of therevelations of microscopes can only admit what microscopesreveal, and they are not equipped to reveal souls.

For a statement of the problem in terms of souls, therefore,

we must take the whole inquiry to the older philosophers.Plato is nearest to hand and easiest for my reader to examinefor himself. It comes up in the Phaedo. There, in the lasttalk between Socrates and the Thebans, Simmias and Cebes,Socrates raises the whole question of knowledge. Whence comesit?

Socrates wastes little time on the possibility of attainingpure knowledge through the senses. Even seeing and hearing,the best of the senses, are not accurate or exact. What thenof the inferior senses of smell, taste and touch? Certainlythe body is of little assistance. On the contrary itcontaminates truth. It keeps man busy finding sustenance for

it. Its diseases hinder the pursuit of truth; it begetspassions, desires, fancies and foolishness, and so constantlydoes it break in on study that the Ego finds it almostimpossible during life to think at all.

But man, Socrates argues, has interior standards of truth, andthe perceptions of this world fall short of them. Twoobjects, for example are almost equal. They just fall shortof a perfect, abstract equality which man can entertainalthough he has never seen perfect equality on this earth. Soit is, Socrates argues, with every other external fact we



contemplate. We measure it against an abstract perfectionwhich cannot have arisen out of earth experience. We look ata triangle. It is not a perfect triangle. How do we know?We have never on earth seen a perfect triangle. Neither havewe ever seen perfectly parallel lines but we persist inthinking of them. So also with a point which we cannot everhave known on earth, and a line, and all the posited ideas ofgeometry. We have abstract perfect criteria for goodness,

truth, beauty, love, justice.

None the less these perfections we cannot quite bring toearth. They are vague and fragmentary, now in our effort torealize them, stronger; and since obviously they are not ofthis human state, in which such perfections are nowhereevident outside of us, there is only one possible explanationof them. They are recollections. They are the earnedaptitudes of a half-remembered past. Of what past?

The scientist recognizes interior recollections that have nocounterparts in this life. He says they are inherited and haserected about them a doctrine of racial memory, but that will

not explain their perfection. His race is evolving. Itsancient memories cannot be of things more perfect thananything in its present state. If so the race isdegenerating.

There is also a school of pietists who deny the interior ideasas memories, preferring to think of them as divine intimationsof the future. Socrates has a quick answer for these!

"If a man, when he has heard or seen or in any other wayperceived a thing, knows not only that thing, but also hasperception of some other thing, the knowledge of which is notthe same but different, are we not right in saying that he

recollects the thing of which he has the perception? . . . Aswhen one sees Simmias, one often remembers Cebes."

What other solutions are there? That we got the perfectionsin this life? Obviously not. That we got them at the instantof birth and lost them in the same instant? This isridiculous. Did we get them in a previous life on this earth?There could be nothing more perfect in a previous human lifethan in this one. Whence then?

From a state that preceded the human one, when, before we werehuman beings, we were in a state higher than the one in whichwe now find ourselves. Our present earth life and the earth

lives preceding it are to be thought of, not as our properplace in a scheme of soul evolution at all. If so we aredegenerating. The old philosophers called our present state atemporary obscuration and the result of some offence of oursagainst divine law. It is an obscuration that has broughtabout a condition of amnesia. Thus only can we explain thehigh memory that is evoked by the imperfect perceptions ofthis earth life.

The problem is the central one in Plato. In Socrates'discussion with Meno, the whole dialogue turns on this theory



of knowledge. If Meno knows the whole of anything he need notask about it. If, on the other hand, he knows nothing aboutit, he can neither ask nor learn. The only possible conditionunder which he can know enough to ask, and little enough toprofit by being told, is that he possess a fragmentaryrecollection of it. This fragment is his fragment of crystal.The instruction enables him to restore it to its originalcompleteness. One man cannot teach another unless by virtue

of the fact that the other has a partial recollection of thetruth to be taught.

Socrates, in Meno's presence, demonstrates the truth of hisdoctrine, when he calls in a slave-boy and, first, by lettingthe boy discover his own ignorance, then by asking himquestions to elicit his memory, leads him through thegeometrical problem of the duplication of the square.

This is the central doctrine in the greatest of the lovers ofwisdom. It is Empedocles' doctrine of the fall into the darkmeadow of Ate. It is Plotinus' doctrine of the restoration ofthe Divine Intelligence and the return to the One. It is the

basis of the Taraka Raja Yoga system which proceeds by anexercise of reminiscence identical with Plato's dialectic or"choosing through." It is the basis of the many mnemonicsystems occultists have used as an aid to meditation, thosecurious arrangements of questions and the philosophicalcategories placed on revolving discs such as the one RaymondLully invented and Giordano Bruno used. It is the basis ofthe lamasery wheels of which the exoteric "praying wheels" arethe distorted form, the discs of the Tibetan mystics called_chakravartins_ or wheel-turners. It is the explanation alsoof the effort of the older philosophers to arrange knowledgein categories. It is the only valid theory of meditationitself as the process of stilling the body and steadying the

mind in order to elicit from the archetypal memory what theEgo has known but has forgotten.

This is the only fertile mode in philosophy. The narrowtreadmill of subject-object must always be sterile, mustalways contradict itself, must always fail of what itundertakes to do. We can only know the higher truth of athing by rising into a higher plane of being.

What then must we do? Await the slow crawl of the evolutionof the soul until we evolve those higher powers? Maybe we cantry to hasten evolution. We had better save ourselves so vainan effort. We would be trying to hasten that which cannot by

its very nature be hastened.

It is not a problem of evolution that faces the soul, andstill less a problem of hastening evolution. It is a problemof resumption, of recovery of atrophied powers long sinceevolved and now forgotten.

This is the testimony of the sages and seers. They do notoffer it as a guess. They offer it as a demonstrable factwhich every man, by virtue of his dormant divinity, may knowfor himself by examining his intuitional memory.



Clearly it is not a current problem in academic philosophy.Philosophers of our time have forsaken intuitional memory anddevoted themselves to the inferior reports of the senses.And, as we have seen, fertile philosophy has tended theserecent years to pass over to the mathematicians for whom thesenses matter less and the intuitions more.

For the purposes of this series, the problem of the theory ofknowledge offers us another picture of the Ego, bewildered andstripped in a strange world which he sees through senses whichare not his own, in a body that limits the use of the mind.He is the possessor of a high reality which he neglects for anillusory appearance he has lost the power to interpret.

V. THE MYSTICAL PROBLEM

We come now upon another phase of the same problem ofconsciousness - that presented by the phenomena of mysticalexperience. I use the word mystical in its modern sense asdescribing an interior revelation that can be hadindependently of the senses and of the reasoning processes.

Needless to say, this idea that there can be a transcendentalknowledge superior to ordinary processes is one of the mostancient in the history of mankind. It is to be found at theorigin of all religious systems, and indeed, as we shall see,all religion is to a lesser or greater degree a distortion ofit. The possibility of this interior experience has beenasserted by the greatest philosophers, by the saints and

sages, and is in a sense the one ever-present and enduringthought in religion. It is also the idea around which thefiercest struggles have raged and against which the bitterestpersecution has been directed.

Although an enormous literature has arisen out of mysticism,only recently - in this era at least - have we had acomparative examination of its phenomena. The first notableone is by the Canadian psychologist Richard Maurice Bucke whoin his _Cosmic Consciousness_ assembled and examined a largenumber of cases of the direct illumination commonly describedas mystical.

It is outside of my purpose in this article to make a completeexamination of Dr. Bucke's material and results, but to dealwith certain special aspects of it. Drawing largely frombiography and autobiography, he cites many remarkable cases ofillumination in the lives of Jesus, Buddha, Walt Whitman,Jacob Boehme, Francis Bacon, Plotinos and other historicalfigures. These he supplements with modern cases of interiorexperience drawn from among his friends and patients.

The records thus gathered present certain common factors. Oneis a more or less definite sense of "lighting up" and is



frequently accompanied by an objective luminosity, when thesubject finds himself bathed in light. Another is the descentupon the subject of an ineffable peace likened to the "peacethat passeth all understanding" in the Christian Testament. Athird is that of possessing a direct apprehension of fact, ameans of knowledge that is best described as the mysticsdescribed it, as transcending reasoning processes altogether.A less common, though no less marked, experience, in the cases

where it is recorded is the modification or completeelimination of the sense of time, as if time were merged orlost in another way in space. The German Theosophist, JacobBoehme, says he saw the "signatures of things" and that he sawthe grass growing.

More important than any of these is the realization by thesubject of a communion between the members of the human raceand an actual sense of being in a realm of consciousness whereall separation and longing are at an end. It is an entry intoa one-consciousness, a seemingly without loss ofindividuality, and a kind of all inclusiveness in which theperson experiencing the new state takes the rest of the race

into his being.

Walt Whitman in _Song of Myself_ describes it thus:

"Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledgethat pass all argument of the earth,

And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and

the women my sisters and lovers,And that a kelson of the creation is love,And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,And brown ants in the little wells beneath them,

And mossy scabs of the worm fence, heap'd stones, elder,mullein and pokeweed."

Dr. Bucke in his analysis of the cases came to severalinteresting conclusions which, while they will not satisfy allthe demands of occult philosophy, represent nevertheless agreat advance in the scientific study of mystical experience.He divides consciousness into three great grades or successivedivisions. The lowest of these, representing subhuman levels,as of the animal, he calls "Simple Consciousness". Thereasoning consciousness of men and women, limited as it is bya sense of separateness, he calls "self consciousness". Theilluminated state, in which separateness disappears, he calls

cosmic consciousness, a level transcending the mental state asmuch as mind transcends the instinctual consciousness of theanimal. Issue has been taken with him on the use of the word"cosmic" as describing too high a level, but nobody has yetsuggested a more satisfactory term.

Since Dr. Bucke's time there have been numerous otherinquiries and, although it is not a popular subject withacademic psychologists because it makes trouble withtheologians with whom they have to live, it has had aconsiderable share of attention from the more independent



writers. The general disposition has been to regard thesuperior consciousness as one into which the human race willeventually evolve, and to look on those who have hadintimations of it as forerunners of the rest of mankind.

When this theory goes hand in hand with the idea of physicalevolution or race-evolution, as it sometimes does, and thereis no element of the immortality of the individual soul

implied in it, it means that succeeding generations of men andwomen begotten of the present ones will have an increasingnumber of cosmically conscious persons among them, cosmicconsciousness becomes the general and finally the universalcondition.

This is a cold idea. It offers the present generation thecomfortless theory that all our striving and suffering is forthe purpose of transmitting to other entities in a distantfuture powers and blessings they have not earned. To completethe anomaly, experimental science has now reached a positionwhere it declares that all our striving will not and cannottransmit its fruit anyway. So poorly do the facts of interior

illumination consort with the Darwinian theory of evolutionthat it is little wonder the psychologists are not fond of thesubject.

When the theory of cosmic consciousness goes hand in hand withthe idea of the survival of the soul of man after death andthe passage of the soul into higher realms of consciousness, aheaven-world or whatever, the disposition of writers - mostlytheologians - is to treat the experience as a passingintimation of the after-death states, a sort of foretaste ofheaven vouchsafed by God to saintly persons during their earthlife. The exponents of this theory are in grave difficulties.The chief one arises out of the fact that the experience is

not confined to saintly persons but sometimes happens topersons whose lives are to say the least heretical andsometimes markedly irreligious in any sense that would pleasethe orthodox God. Conversely many persons of saintly conductdo not achieve any such foretaste of the hereafter. Theironical commentary on this theory is that the cosmic visionhas been frequent among those whom the Church found necessaryto burn at the stake. In fact the church has had a definiteantipathy to persons who had a foretaste of its own Heaven.It may have feared that some visionary would blurt out thetruth.

A much better theory of it is the Hindu one - that the soul is

engaged in a pilgrimage of experience which requires a longseries of lives on this earth, in the course of which itevolves successive powers. Having passed through an arc ofdescent from spirit to matter and having turned at the mineralon its way back to a vastly enriched spiritual existence, thesoul, they teach, has had successively the consciousness ofthe mineral, the plant and the animal, and is now passingthrough the mental state of consciousness as man. Beyond themental state is a state of direct cognition or awakening intoreality, which they call Buddhi. This has been attained bythe leaders of mankind and into it all men will in due time



enter. Those who have experienced it partially are ourvanguard on the long path of the evolution of the soul. Thisis the opinion commonly offered today as Theosophy. In pointof fact it is orthodox Brahminism and is, in its own way,scarcely less a distortion of Theosophy than is orthodoxChristianity.

The fatal defect of the Brahmin explanation of the data of

cosmic consciousness is identical with the defect of theChristian explanation of the ecstasies of the saints as anadvance knowledge of the hereafter. Both religions assumethat those who have a touch of cosmic consciousness are ofgreat mental and spiritual stature.

The facts show that they are not. While many who experiencethe higher vision are, like Jesus and Buddha, beings oftranscendent spirituality, and some, like Bacon, are giants ofintellect, many of the recorded cases are of very simple,often ignorant and frequently anything but blameless people.The experience is nothing if not sporadic and obeys a law ofits own nature. The Christian finding no rule for it

attributes the whole thing to the pleasure of God. TheBrahmin, whose theory of gradual advance would require thatbefore going on with a realm above mind, a man should haveexhausted the development of mind, has no adequate explanationto offer.

This curious illumination strikes like lightning. While itdoes favor the saint, it does not neglect the sinner. Itcomes very often to the sick, to the drunkard and theepileptic. Remarkable cases of conversion (literally,together-turning) as in the cases of Raymond Lully, JohnBunyan and others, show that it can come even to men plungedin vice.

The learned, the ignorant, the devoted, the austere, thesodden, the well, the sick, the vicious, the nearly mad -these are not categories of leadership. Half of them give thelie to the other half. Nor did Jesus seem to expect thatleaders would be the readiest to receive his message ofliberation. He tended to pass over acknowledged leaders andto devote himself to those who by reason of misery andsuffering on earth were best able to understand a doctrine oftranscending earth and entering into a Kingdom of Heaven thathe declared awaited them. Gautama did not confine himself toleaders among men. He found great men as did Jesus but hisdoctrine was as readily applicable to the vicious as to the

austere. The _Dhammapada_ shows him going to young men miredin their vices and bidding them turn. When they did theybecame Arhats.

That the manifestation in man of a power above the level ofmind is the experience of men and women whose intellectualpowers are not equal to the task of explaining it, isevidenced by the fact that mystics themselves differ widely intheir explanations.

Mystics with an inclination for orthodox Christianity, for



example, say the illumination flows into the soul by asupernatural channel. For the Roman Catholic Church theChurch itself is such a channel. So are the sacraments. Formystics of Protestant sects, the Bible is a magical channel.

Quietistic cults like the Friends and the followers of theAbbe Fenelon and Madame Guyon ascribe the results to directDivine intervention. They say that, in answer to aspiration,

God himself acts immediately upon the mind of the devotee.Jacob Boehme held this theory of his own remarkableexperiences. He declared that in his vision he saw God. H.P.Blavatsky remarks drily that what he saw was his Divine Ego,as all aspirants eventually see it.

More valid than either of these is the Platonist theorymaintained by the most philosophical of the mystics. They saythat the illumination comes by faith or intuition resident inthe higher consciousness of the soul itself, and that therecan be direct attainment of truth by virtue of the fact thatman possesses from a previous world-period an inheritance ofwisdom which he now neglects, but which he may at any time

recover. A momentary return of it may be experienced underspecial conditions.

Obviously the cosmic consciousness is not, then, a latentthing, in the sense that it is still to be developed. It is adormant thing in the sense that it has been developed and losttemporarily. It is not a potentiality to be realized in adistant future. It is an ever-present knowledge which thevast majority of men cannot use because it is overlaid bymental and emotional confusions. When such a power can bearoused by aspiration, the following of intuitions, or byausterity, it is sufficiently explained as an intimation of anew power. When, however, it comes direct out of intense

suffering, out of turning from vice, or out of disturbedphysical conditions, we need a wider formula than either theBrahmin or Christian one. We need a formula that willreconcile the contradictions. The old occult formula, theonly one that will serve the unbiased inquirer, is that cosmicconsciousness is an old, hard-earned power, lost and in thesecases for a brief time recovered. The Christian formula forit, as the words were originally understood, is that in theparable of the prodigal, "This my son was dead and is aliveagain; he was lost and is found."

The implication in the highest mystical and occult schools -indeed the explicit statement many times repeated - is that we

thinking souls are all prodigals, alienated from a divineunified consciousness which the _New Testament_ calls _hotheos,_ the god. That consciousness we have as a dim,flickering, inward light.

This aspect of it as a unified whole is important for purposesof the present study. The universal characteristic of alltrue experiences of cosmic consciousness is an immeasurablyquickened sense of unity with the rest of mankind. This isvariously described. Sometimes it is a flooding of the natureof the subject with a great love. Sometimes it presents



itself as a sense of peace resultant on the passing away ofthe sense of separateness. It has also been described as anattainment of the centre of a wheel where stillness prevailsand the stress of earth life, even of mental life, vanishes.It is the place of stillness that the Chinese called Tao, andthe Buddhists call Alaya. "Alas, alas, that all men shouldpossess Alaya," says _The Voice of the Silence,_ "and thatpossessing it Alaya should so little avail them."

All these descriptions bear out the old idea that the worldabove mind is the Oneness towards which At-one-ment tends, andthat we only lose our way in a too far removed andunserviceable notion when we talk of being merged in UltimateDeity. The Unity to which we are now returning is the rest ofour race - the divine exiles here on earth.

This seems to be the reason why persons who have had a touchof cosmic consciousness show a prevailing impulse for the restof their lives to make mankind the object of their devotion,to see God as it were in their brothers' faces. All truehumanism has arisen primarily out of this mystical vision and

has taken its stand against the worship of a personal God.The older humanists called the Divine Communion, in whose bodywe are all atoms, Osiris, and symbolized the present partitionof mankind into scattered and confused souls as thedismemberment of Osiris, the fragments of whose body mustagain be assembled. It is to the assembling of the fragmentsthat the Masters are pledged.

Damascius says of this resurrection of the dismembered Osiris,or return to the higher consciousness, that it "should be amingling with the God, an all-perfect at-one-ment, a returnupwards of our souls to the divine".

So we have again, in another problem of modern science whichis compelling the attention of students, a picture of the soulof man which can transcend mind under conditions socontradictory as to preclude the idea that the soul is slowlyevolving into the transcendent state. We must decide whetherwe will take our stand with the Church mystics and theQuietists and say it is the fantastic gift of a personal God,or with H.P. Blavatsky and the occultists who say it is therenewal, brief or enduring, of an ancient power of entering acommon consciousness we have forgotten.

VI. THE THEOLOGICAL PROBLEM

Within recent years theological problems presented in thetheologian's manner have ceased to be matters of greatimportance to thinking people. They are survivals of a gloomyinterval in the history of mankind and do not conform to afree habit of thought. Emancipated thinking must be based onverifiable experience that can be correlated and made to yieldlaws. While the proper correlation may be greatly assisted by



the records of previous enquiry and by intuitional processes,it is none the less necessary that the whole inquiry have itsroots in physical, emotional and mental phenomena.

Instead of proceeding from fact on any of these three planes,theologians demand that you proceed from imputed fact - dogma.This dogma, which we now know derives from an ancient,symbolical guide to the intuitions, has been so badly

mutilated that it will no longer interpret fact. Thetheologian is in a quandary. Lacking the ability to impose itby force, he must discard it altogether or thump a desk andassert that it is fact.

The primary material of Christian theology - all othertheologies embody the same principle but manifest it variously- instead of being made up of data of experience, is a body oftradition or fable, handed down from generation to generation,and, as I have suggested, badly distorted in its manytransfers. In its starkest form the tradition is as follows.

That the universe and all its creatures are the product of an

omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent, but none the lesspersonal God, who is moved by anger, jealousy, unwillingnessto forgive and by preferences for one of His creatures overanother. That the first human beings He created in His ownimage proved a disappointment and plunged themselves and alltheir physical descendants into a state of alienation from theomniscient God who must have known perfectly well what theyintended to do, but was none the less angry with them for whatHe permitted them to do. So unrelenting was He, or soincompetent at finding a way out of His mistake that it was atrifle over four thousand years before He executed a scheme ofredemption by which He incarnated on earth as His own Son.Those who would or could thereafter believe such a relief

measure was actually the work of the same One Cause, who keptthe stars in their courses, ordered the minerals and plantsand animals with all their myriad intricacies andramifications, could at death go to eternal happiness. Thosewho for some defect could not, were condemned for eternity toan inferior state, if not to a state of actual torment.

Most theologians, for reasons of common sense, would repudiateso bare a statement. They avoid bare statements of theirdogma because without theological adornment and a thick mistof words it is too terrible for acceptance. Rarely does anyof them dare to state it even in full. They devote theirlives to special and less contradictory aspects of it.

None the less, what I have given is a map of the theologicaltheatre of war, and all the great battles of theology havebeen settled or are still raging within its boundaries.

The profound controversy between theists and deists is betweenthose who think that a personal God, having made the world,remains in touch with all His creatures to hear their prayersand importunities, and those who think that having made it,the personal God is now beyond reach and is no longerbothering about it. The deists are called rational



theologians.

The intricate trinitarian dispute turns on whether Godincarnated Himself as His Son, or whether He made for theoccasion a Son of superior quality but separate from Himself.

The struggles over original sin are also within the map. Theyhave to do with the mystery of that first offence which God

must have anticipated but which so gravely annoyed him when itoccurred. They have to do with the precise nature of theoffence, the extent of the alienation, and the justice of theinheritance of the penalty by souls who had nothing to do withthe offence and do not even know what it was.

The famous, but never finished, war between the Traducians andthe Creationists is a dispute about the origin of theindividual soul and started as a skirmish in the fight aboutoriginal sin. The Traducians declared that souls aregenerated at the same time and in the same manner as bodies,by sexual union. Thus only, the Traducians said, could therebe any transmission of the original sin by inheritance. The

Creationists insisted that whenever two bodies came togetherand made a third, God hurriedly created a soul to thrust intoit. Although Traducianism is the only theory (within the map)that will validate original sin, it is now rarely held. TheCreationist picture of a God of love making an innocent newsoul to accommodate the amours of a drunkard and a harlot, whowill later instruct it in their arts and send it bowling alongto hell, has evidently proven more attractive to thetheologians. Perhaps it is another mystery into which youmust not peer - or you may laugh.

The unending controversy between exponents of free-will andthose of predestination with all the rarefied subtleties that

have gone into it, is a war to decide, within the boundaries Ihave outlined, whether, because God knows everything inadvance - as would become an omniscient deity - all events aretherefore fixed, or whether one of God's creatures can decideof his own free will to do something God knows in advance hewill not do or something God had not foreseen. Predestinationdestroys the whole point of the redemptive system, becausewhether an individual will be saved or not is all fixed inadvance. Free will, on the other hand, makes God less thanomniscient. If the Predestinarian is right, God knows inadvance every time he makes a soul for eternal torment, butseemingly He continues to do so because He is bound by a lawmanifested in the sexual proclivities of His creatures. In

which case again He is not only less than omnipotent but is aservant of sex.

The wars over the true apostolic succession are no more thancommercial wars about the authorized agency for the redemptionbrought to earth by Incarnate God. The apostolic successorswould argue that in addition to making an inefficient schemeof salvation, God further vitiates its efficiency bypermitting a monopoly of it instead of using every agency tofurther it. They have this in their favor of course, that theGod who would work out such a system of salvation would be



just the one to limit its use. He is that kind of a God.

The controversy over the actuality of the eternal torment forthose who rejected or missed redemption are wars of method.They are between those who believe in scaring men into thearms of a loving Father, and those who would lure men into thearms of an angry one. Or the other way about. It does notmake much difference.

These are the great wars. There are numberless little ones.Does the power of the Incarnated God to absolve from sincontinue in his human self-elected successors and exponents?Does an infant who dies without doing wrong suffer eternallyfor the sin of those first parents to whom he is in no wayspiritually related except through the Loving God who made allthree? Can a ritual of admission to a Church save such aninfant from the penalties for sins he never committed? HasGod made any provision or amnesty for those who missedredemption because God made them before it came into effect?Has He made any provision or amnesty for those who miss it orhave missed it for geographical reasons - being born in an

unfavorable place? Has He made any provision for those whorefused the whole doctrine because they sincerely believedthey had a better one, or because the men who tried topersuade them by argument or force were notoriously debauchedor dishonest or cruel? If God has made any or all of theseprovisions is it not a much less advantageous thing for a manto hear of redemption than to live in ignorance where theresponsibility is not so great? Was not the whole redemptivescheme, therefore, a further cruelty in that it put on some aresponsibility it did not put on others? Who is to be heldresponsible, the Congo native who dies in ignorance ofredemption for lack of a visit from the missionary, or themissionary who went to a garden-party instead of carrying the

message to the native? Or does God personally adjust theselesser inadvertences at the last day? Since all cases containinadvertences, might He not merely adjust each case as itcomes up without any redemptive complications at all? Isredemption to be considered the reward of godlike acts, or isit the reward of simple belief in the scheme? If it is thereward of acts, what point would there be in redeeming a dyingman already bankrupted by his sins? If this is the reward offaith the sooner a man dies after his redemption the better.This, incidentally, was the position of the Chicago clergymanwho, having reconciled a murderer with his God, opposed acommutation of the death penalty, for fear his convert, ifpermitted to live, would fall again from grace. The clergyman

was strictly logical within the theologian's scheme. If otherclergymen were as logical, and were devoted enough, they wouldfirst save and then shoot their converts.

These are a few of the crucial issues of Christian theology.They fill the dusty tombs of those great and good men whosebooks we see but so rarely read. Stripped of their latinityand reduced to everyday language these are the subjectstheologians debate. They are at great pains, however, not tolet the contradictions get into one sentence where they willbecome too evident. As long as they are carefully



compartmented they are impressive. If perchance thecontradictions become evident the theologian says, "That is agreat mystery, and it does not do to pry into the inscrutablewill of God. It unsettles faith," he says. What he means isthat such enquiry unsettles theology. People will reject hissystem as valid theory and his revelation as fact.

You will observe that for the theologian his dogma presents

many problems. For the person no longer persuaded that theCreator of the universe can be so incompetent and ridiculous apersonage as the theologian makes him, there can be only oneproblem - a psychological one.

How has such a farrago of nonsense maintained the tenacioushold it has upon the minds of men?

There are several reasons, some lesser, and one, I believe,the great central reason. One reason is to be found in humanlaziness, the willingness to let men whose trade it is arguethese problems. Another reason is human fear - the fear ofgoing in the face of bigotry. Another and more important

reason is that the flower of the teaching of Jesus,regeneration through love, has so commended itself to good menand women that they have accepted for its sake the tangle ofdegradations the theologians have permitted to grow up aroundit. Another reason is that, aided by the forces of bigotryand frightened compliance, theologians of a certain type have,wherever they could, destroyed the traces of efforts men havemade to purify and cleanse it.

Beyond all these, the great reason for its persistence isthat, concealed within its misshapen form, there is justenough of the element of truth to arouse in men the vaguememory of a truth they once held but have forgotten and cannot

quite recall. Deformed as the fable is, it has still thediscernible shape of an age-old wisdom about the origin of manand of his relation to earth. The dogma has the power to stirthe ancient memory without reviving it, and men cling to thedistorted formula in dread that if they lose it they will haveno clue at all. The more they dread the loss of the clue themore frantic and bigoted they become.

There is no absolute untruth in the world. The grossestsuperstitions are divine visions reflected in the waters ofman's desires, and the more disturbed the waters, the morehideous the reflections. The Kabbalist says, "_Demon deusinversus est_ - the evil principle is only the godlike

principle upside down."

For the student of occultism every distorted image is a divineimage he must restore. Every myth, every fanaticism, everybroken fragment of unclean magic, has somewhere at the heartof it a clue to a divine function. Man does not make newideas of religion; he gets old ideas wrong.

Let us see if we can find what was in the minds of the firstprogenitors of the fable, who possessed their memory of theancient truth, and see then how the theologian has reflected



it in the waters of his own desire. In order to do so we mustnow go outside the Christian field because although alltheologies are distorted the distortion varies with thereligion.

By putting fragments together and comparing one with anotherwe discover the original formula to have been something likethis:

That from an Absolute Divinity, an Unmanifest, have emergedwave upon wave of beings, no less divine than their ineffablesource but limited by their conceptions of themselves. Thatin long process of ages they have proceeded through experienceto more and more extended consciousness, presenting in theaggregate the picture of a great army of journeying soulsstretched out along a road, none less divine than any other,but differentiated by their consciousness of divinity. Thatnot only do they advance but they are bound by the law oftheir being to preserve the unity of the whole bytransmitting, each to the orders below it, in a kind of cosmiclink-motion, the spiritual forces received from the orders of

beings beyond. That, being each a first cause in his ownright, they have the same free will that inheres in the greatFirst Cause, and can manifest it in the measure that they haverealized divinity. That in the chain, however it came about,a race, identified with this earth before the thinking Egostouched it, broke down, and whether by the exercise of its ownwill or by the failure of the will of the regents who guidedit, became distorted. That another race beyond these - ourown - whose duty it was to transmit higher powers to the lowerrace, refused to accept responsibility for the misshapencreatures, or to enter into them. That at last under cosmiclaw the higher race was compelled to do so, was drawn downinto the sphere of earth, where its individuals dwell now,

embodying themselves as rarely as cosmic law will permit, inthe misshapen bodies of the beings they have to redeem. Thatby their rebellion they have lost a great measure of thepowers they first brought to earth, and instead of being theUnity they once were, are a scattered and terrified host.That if they take thought and renew their lost powers they canreturn to that comparatively high wisdom from which they fell.That if they do not they must inevitably be drawn down intothe creatures they despise. That from time to time one of theunwilling becomes willing, performs his task, returns to theUnity with his brothers - the God of which he is a part - andknowing the truth pledges himself to work for the restorationof it among his exiled brethren here upon earth. That such

liberated ones work without ceasing, relying upon each otherfor support, and creating a unified body of doctrine whichthey renew from century to century as the activities oftheology vitiate it. That the liberated one stands in therelation of exemplar and friend to the rest of mankind, andthat it is the Ego who is, himself, the redeemer and potentialSon of the Unity or God he has forgotten. That the originalsin which taints us all refers therefore to the refusal andthat it is carried from incarnation to incarnation by each Egoand not from father to child by generation.



At first glance it seems as fantastic a formula, perhaps, asthe other. It has this difference, however, that it iscapable of proof by phenomena on all planes. It is the key tocomparative religion and it agrees with the findings ofphilosophy and the sciences as far as they have gone. Often,as I have shown, it solves what they cannot.

Let us see now how the theologians vitiated the age-old

formula - in what desires they let it reflect itself.

Their first destructive step was when they desired that theirGod should be more important and all-inclusive than the godsof their rival religions. They expanded the phrase "the God"in the books they had inherited. "The God" was evidently whatthe Eastern religious teachers called Atma. It is our Unityor Oversoul and functions in a realm immediately superior tomind. Between it and the First Cause are vast ranges ofconsciousness which will be beyond our ken for untold ages.As soon as the theologians of those early years said "Our Godis the All-God" they started at once a series of destructivecontradictions, and they had to give attributes to an Absolute

Unmanifest who cannot have attributes.

The next distortion arising out of their desires was when theymade their teacher Jesus the one and unique Son of theirAbsolute God. This required that they wipe out all traces ofprevious teachers who were also Sons of "the God". Itrequired also that they destroy the symbolic and exemplaryrelation of Jesus to all Egos and have it in the special andhistorical relation of the pseudo-deity Jesus to all mankind.It was Sanchoniathon who said of the Egyptians that "theycorrupted their mysteries by cosmical and historicalaffections," which is precisely what these early Christiansdid. They made "the God" cosmic in his scope, and the Son who

was the symbol of each Ego they reduced to a historicalincident.

When you have told one lie you must either acknowledge it ortell another. No falsehood ever stood alone. In order tovalidate their cosmic Father and His unique Son they had towipe out also that which had been explicit in earlyChristianity, as it is in all religions at the beginning, thedoctrine of the rebirth of the soul. If the OmnipotentCreator after a long interval begets His one and only Son, itis essential for a belief in it that the souls who are to besaved shall come only once to earth. If they have come manytimes before and are to come again and again thereafter as a

means of working out their own destiny, the one and onlyappearance of the Saviour must be only a trifling incident intheir lives. Furthermore if you admit the principle of comingagain and again, the first thing you know you will have thenecessary idea of a Saviour coming again and again, which ofcourse plays the mischief with the unique redeemer idea.People will shop around and go where they like the theologybest. It also arouses the suspicion that the pagan redeemerswhose cults surrounded early Christianity might have beensimilarly Sons of God. Buddha might have been a redeemer, andKrishna, and Dionysos, and Attis, and Hercules, and Horus, and



Baldur. So, abolishing reincarnation from their formula, theearly Christian theologians had to fall back upon thealternative of souls begetting souls by sex or of God creatingsouls to order.

Another distortion of the ancient truth must necessarilyfollow. If the soul has not lived before, it cannot haveshared in an offence that alienated it from the God.

Therefore the very evident state of alienation that existsmust have been inherited in some obscure way or must arise outof God's annoyance at the behavior of Adam and Eve.

The old universal saying is that the soul alone isresponsible. What it has sown, that also must it reap. Thedegraded formula says, "By a special act of clemency on God'spart, the soul may sow a great evil and reap a great good, ormay sow a little good but for lack of having taken part inGod's clemency, may reap a great evil." Exact justice thusbecomes a farce. When the Church Fathers had extracted thelast comic element out of it in this form, their Latinsuccessors developed new comic values by remitting evil

themselves. Then they spun out the doctrine to permit of theissue of coupons that would remit sins even before they werecommitted.

It is easy, therefore, to see how men who take such a doctrineand by falsifying the idea of "the God" so necessary to itsusefulness, by removing the idea that each soul is a redeemerof a fallen being, by vesting the redemptive power in onepersonage, by throwing away the necessary idea of the pre-existence of the soul, and by making justice the whim ofdeity, must come out with a monstrous caricature of the oldidea.

They have had hundreds of chances to amend. They had a choicebetween Plato who knew it and Aristotle who did not. Theywiped out the Platonists and clung to Aristotle. Origen knewand taught it and they put him under anathema. In 1400 it wasa punishable offence on the part of Pico della Mirandola evento offer to debate whether Origen was in hell. Paul knew theold tradition and for centuries the Latin theologians wouldwillingly have left him out of the New Testament. Theylabored to supplant him with their favorite Peter through whomthey had exclusive sales-rights on salvation. The Mithraistsknew it and the Holy fathers crushed them. The Manicheansknew it and a hundred thousand were put to death with torture.Basilides knew it and his books were burned. The Cathars and

Albigenses knew it and were mercilessly destroyed even thoughthe south of France had to be devastated. The troubadoursknew it and paid with their lives. Lully knew it and waslocked up as mad. Dante knew it and was an exile all hislife. Roger Bacon knew it and was kept under lock and key.Bruno knew it and was burned to death.

Since the Renaissance the burnings have been less frequent.The bigots have been forced to use persecutions of a lessersort, obscurantism, tampering with books, and fulminationsfrom their pulpits.



There has never been but one heresy - the effort to restorethe old doctrine of the exile of the soul and to restate themeans by which each man must find his way back into the wisdomof the God.

VII. THE MYTHOLOGICAL PROBLEM

In the preceding article I have offered a brief version of anancient formula as an approximation to the truth underlyingChristian theological distortions of the tradition of the falland redemption. I have claimed for the formula that it is akey, not only to the understanding of the Christian mythos,but to the interpretation of all other mythological systems.I am now under obligation to demonstrate that it is as I havesaid.

It should require no great space to prove that Christianity,however bitterly theologians argue for its historicity, is amythos like all the others. It is true that for manycenturies, during which, there was a poverty of comparativedata, the theologians had little difficulty in persuading menthat the miraculous birth, the escape from slaughter ininfancy, the baptism by the fore-runner, the transfigurationon the mount, the temptation, the crucifixion, and ascensionof Jesus were unique in religion, and were celebrations on thepart of God of His special paternity of the Judean redeemer.Neither was it difficult in those days to argue that thesayings of Jesus embody a truth and ethic previouslyunattained by any sage or prophet among men.

A better informed generation knows now, from archaeologicalresearch and the inflow of Eastern scriptural writings, thatevery religion has had its virgin mothers, most religionsseveral of them. Virgin birth is now recognized to be muchmore a spiritual than a physical fact. Better philosophersthan ours find something ridiculous in our Christianinsistence on a foolish and unnecessary trick by which a Godwould distinguish this unique Son from the multitudes of otherordinary sons. The slaughter of the innocents by Herod hasnever been taken as fact except by the credulous. Sowholesale a massacre would have been corroborated by a dozenclassical historians. Now we know that an identical legend

forms part of the symbolic story of every avatar in hisinfancy. Buddhist Gautama, Hindu Krishna, Egyptian Horus, allhad similar escapes from the powers of evil, and in theEgyptian mythos, the jealous ruler was actually called Herrut,the "slayer of the youngling in the egg". Even Herod seems tohave been used mythically. All religions have theillustration as a symbol of the passing under the waters, orplunging in the waters of desire. Most religions have atransfiguration on the mount, and of some of these othertransfigurations, notably the Buddhist and Egyptian, ours isonly an attenuated shadow. Even our cherished cross is a



universal glyph of the process by which a superman sacrificeshimself for an erring race, and is the symbol of the means bywhich, having done it, he rejoins the Oversoul. GautamaBuddha is marked with a cross on his forehead; Krishna istransfixed to a tree by an arrow in a cruciform attitude;Horus is crucified on an orb between two trees or "breathers";Bacab in ancient Yucatan is crucified between two revilers inTzonpantli, the place of the skull. All redeemers ascend to

heaven after their work is done and take their place with theFather. The husband of the Virgin of the world is always anartificer, Vulcan, mate of Venus Urania; Joseph of Mary; Sebof Isis; Brihaspati of Soma. The secret teaching isinvariably given on mounts of vision; the twelve apostleshave their parallels in the twelve labors, the twelveadversaries of Buddha twelve initiations, twelve Zodiacal signand the twelve powers in the body along the girdle of thebeast. The avatars are always fishers of men, or shepherds ofmen, or both. There is always an adversary who has been castout in some fabulous war in heaven.

Even the Logia or sayings of Jesus, clung to so desperately by

men whose business it is to prove that they are selling anexclusive line of goods, are not original with the Christianscriptures. They all have their earlier parallels, oftenricher and fuller than the fragments which survived our era ofpatristic bigotry. The Sermon on the Mount is age-old and wasnever spoken extemporaneously. It was obviously written. TheLord's Prayer has earlier parallels for every phrase, so alsohave the parables. The whole story of Jesus, from Gethsemaneto the end is not a historical narrative. It is a scenariofor the secret mystery drama of the early, Christians, thatdrama to which St. Paul refers when he says: "O foolishGalatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey thetruth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set

forth, crucified among you?"

To the kind of man for whom there is more virtue in a story ifit be given time and place, and if all the events in it areactual, this passing of the treasured marvels of thehistorical life of Jesus into spiritual myth is a desecration.To the thinking man such a spiritualization opens a door intowisdom. History, he knows, is shadow; myth is the effort ofthe creative mind to explain the truth behind shadow. Ahistorical event is over and done with; a myth is ongoing andeternal. Sallustius, the Neo-Platonist said of Greek myths -and of all myths: "These things never were; they alwaysare."

As the Christian fable resumes its place among the cosmicstories of the world, it takes on dignity. The tradition,once frankly allegorical, then reduced for so many centuriesto the imbecility of unrelated fact, stands again abreast ofthe great spiritual dramas of the race, and may be interpretedby means of its parallels.

There are three kinds of modern writers about mythology. Thefirst are the few who see in it a secret tradition passingfrom generation to generation, kept always in the world for



returning and returning souls as they become in time pure andintuitive enough to receive it. They interpret the parallelsof religion and myth as meaning that all systems emanate fromthe one body of truth available to all sages. These myth-interpreters have their reward in the wisdom that comes ofdiscerning similarities and in the power that comes ofteaching.

The second are the mythologists who with a great parade ofscholarship and scientific method, but with a definiteintention, none the less, to bring in a verdict for theuniqueness of Christianity, plunge into the subject and emergepresently with a book that proves, by disparaging all otherfaiths, that Christianity is the sole and effulgent light ofthe world. These get their reward in professorships,curatorships of museums, editorships of safe books andoccasionally a bishopric. They produce many books but are notextensively read. Their celebrity arises chiefly from thefact that they quote each other approvingly. It is verydoubtful, for instance, if you have ever read a book by J.Estlin Carpenter, or Professor Grant Showerman or Dr.

Pfleiderer, but if you have ever read any book in this class,you are sure they are great men.

Third are the mythologists who, having observed the success inour time of the materialistic doctrine of evolution, haveendeavored to interpret mythology along lines parallel to it.They decide that myths evolved with man. All religiousfables, they say, arose out of primitive misapprehension andsuperstition, and all religion is the philosophization of theerrors of savage belief. These mythologists try, according tovarious formula, to probe the benighted mind for theinfluences hunger, fear, cruelty, and lust - that were thefirst parents of religious belief. If they are consistent in

their theory, of course, they have to find that Christianityis similarly a collection of rationalized outcroppings ofsavagery, but their art and usually their fame is in themeasure of their skill in not saying so in a manner that willgive offence. Most of them make a slight, but stilldiscernible, genuflexion as they pass the altar. They havetheir reward in being acclaimed as very scientific anduncompromising, and are said to be abreast of modern culture.They produce many books and are most widely read of the threeclasses. None the less they are a puzzled lot.

Their first difficulty arises out of the fact that none ofthem has ever succeeded in proving that a religion evolves, on

even improves as time goes by. Like the Christian apologistwhose business requires him to demonstrate the superiority ofChristianity, they have carried a partial conclusion intotheir impartial enquiry.

Every datum of religion indicates that a religious system doesnot evolve. It always degenerates. It is never born of humanignorance, but of human vision. The normal habit of mankindis not to enrich the lucubrations of the village idiot, but tocheapen and miss the point of the sentences of the villagewise man. The best Christian to date has been the inspirer,



whoever he was, of the Christian renewal of the wisdomtradition. No Christian would contend for a moment that thefounder of Christianity had been surpassed or improved on.The best Buddhist so far, and the wisest, has been GautamaBuddha. The best exponent of Bhagavad Gita has been theteacher who uttered it. There has been no Platonist greaterthan Plato, no teacher of Yoga greater than Patanjali, noexponent of Veda greater than Veda Vyasa, no Hermetist greater

than Hermes, no Zoroastrian greater than Zoroaster, nor anyVedantin greater than Sankara. A stream does not rise higherthan its source. What student would be so foolish as to readthe five thousand words of Lao-Tse and then examining modernTaoism with its devils and its shamanism, declare that thepresent form had evolved? A garment evolves? It evolvestatters and filth.

We have no trouble demonstrating the degeneration of livingreligions, where we can find something of the personality ofthe prophetic founder and his apostles. Why then should wesuppose that a different law supervenes when the personalitiesof the founders' are missing? Or should we, having a system,

refuse to believe there was a founder? Whatever is true ofreligions whose whole duration falls within the historicalperiod is true also of those whose start was prehistoric. Whyaccept a Jesus or a Lao-Tse or a Buddha and reject an Orpheusor a Hermes? And finding the degraded fragments of an olderfaith why should we suppose them to have had an origindifferent from that of the degraded fragments of a youngerone?

If the older forms are more corrupt it is not because theyhave had a different kind of origin, but, obviously, becausethey are older, and more thousands of misunderstanders of thefirst ideal have had a chance to corrupt them. One selfish or

stupid man can defile a whole sect; he can disgust the moreintelligent members of it with his distortions of truth until,when they go elsewhere, hey can have only the people foolishenough to perpetuate his follies. How great then can be thedestructive effect on a religion of the entry into it ofthousands of self-seeking and inferior men who make filthy itsfirst intent. With such a destructive process in mind it isnot hard to foresee the time, for instance; when theselfishness and bigotry of the followers of Christianityencrusting it with their dogmas of papal infallibility, ofsacraments that are pure whether the priest is or not, ofplenary absolutions, of indulgences, of extreme unctions, ofassumptions of Mary; their fetichisms of sacred hearts, of

charms and amulets and scapulars, of magical waters, ofreproduced stigmata, and bones and nails and bits of wood, ofVeronica's napkins, will make Christianity no longer fit forthe use of the higher kind of intelligent humans ands willhasten it down the long road to voodoo and tribal magic.

In the meantime thinking souls will have enlisted under otherand newer teachers, no more inspired than the Christian and noless Sons of the God, but with a restored and cleaner magic.If in lives to come one of our present Christians happen onbroken shards of the Christian vessel and thinks of them, as



born of the mistakes of savage minds, he will be making thesame error about the Nazarene that our mythologists make aboutthe forgotten northern sage whose wisdom remains to us in theElder Edda, or about that Thoth-Hermes whose vision became thehocus-pocus of a thousand Egyptian cemeteries.

This is the prime reason why the evolutionary mythologists arepuzzled. If you are quite sure that nine-tenths of the

material of your study is nonsense, it will be fatally easy -for reasons of mental laziness alone - to give up your effortto understand a difficult problem, and assign the whole thingto the nonsense division. The man who is satisfied that theearth is flat and that the sun goes over and under it, cannever become a distinguished interpreter of Copernicus, norwill any man who thinks compassion a waste of time make muchof the sayings of Gautama Buddha. Neither will anyone who issure the science of philology was invented yesterday have thepatience to unriddle the _Cratylus_ of Plato. Instead youwill find him saying, "Plato, so intelligent about othermatters, was ignorant and credulous in his tracing of theorigins of Greek words, and his Cratylus has no scientific

value." Which is to say that the clear-eyed Plato, in spiteof the strictest habit of examination of any philosopher wehave ever known, in spite of a lifetime in the use of Greek,in spite of association with the greatest trained minds of thegolden gage of Athens, in spite of an intimate knowledge ofthe several dialects and related languages, the possession ofdictionaries that have disappeared, for all he pondered wordsand was the greatest classical user of them, for all he wasthe avowed continuer of the then-extant lore of Orpheus,Onomacritus, Pherecydes, Aglaophamus, Homer, Pythagoras andPindar, word makers and users, knew less of these things thana foggy-minded English or German curate.

Similarly you will find such a Grad-grind writing, "The Greekmind, of course, was incapable of understanding such and sucha thing" or, "It never occurred to the ancient Egyptian that -", or "The Hindu could not conceive of - ", or when Homer doesnot specifically mention something, saying "It is certain thatHomer knew nothing of - " Sometimes you will find one ofthese omniscient gentlemen writing this kind of nonsense;"The figure of the infant Horus with his finger upon his lipswas long considered a symbol of secrecy, and was used as suchby Egyptian, Greek, and Roman secret societies. Modernresearch shows that it meant nothing of the sort; that it wasmerely a sign of childish innocence." That is to say, thesocieties that used it and the sculptors who made it with such

a use in mind, as a sign of the inviolability of a mysterycult did not know why they used it or why they made it. Whatis one to do with minds like these? Yet such are the constantprocesses of argument brought to bear on the moderninterpretation of myth. These are the absurdities inseparablefrom an evolutionary theory of religion.

With this habit to defeat their best endeavors it is easy tosee why our interpreters of religious fable do not penetratefar into the mystery. They have in recent years worked out adefinition of myth on which most of them agree. In the



version of W. Sherwood Fox it is as follows:

"A myth is a statement, or virtual statement as implied in asymbol, an attribute, or an epithet, accepted as true by itsoriginal maker and his hearers, and referring to the eternalnature and past acts of beings greater than man, andfrequently to circumstances which to us are improbable orimpossible."

It is the requirement of this school of thinking that thephrase "accepted as true by its original maker and hishearers," should mean that it was accepted as literally true,or if some element of symbol did enter in it must be such asymbol as could be easily grasped by childlike minds. If onesuggests that it may have been offered as philosophical ormythical allegory, these mythologists reply that being born ofsavagery it could have had only a trifling interpretation.Under no circumstances must you attribute a high meaning to italthough it is permissible to attribute ever so far-fetched alow one. Their dogma is that because it originated early inthe history it must have a less profound value than if it had

appeared later. Which is the same as saying that all laterpoets must be superior to all earlier ones, that all laterphilosophers must be wiser than all earlier philosophers andall later teachers more profound than all earlier ones. Whichof course is nonsense.

The outstanding fact about human thought is that wisdom iswhere you find it and you are more likely to find it in adocument of tradition that has had the power to move manypersons over a long period of time. The great myths mayeasily have been - indeed the mass of evidence is in favor oftheir having been - the symbolical expression of ideas fromwhich we are excluded because of materialistic prejudices.

The same Sallustius I quoted before had another wise sayingabout which is a key to the art of myth reading. It was thatwhen the events of a myth become improbable or impossible asliteral fact it became the duty of the student to look for aspiritual fact. Only an evolutionary mythologist can assumethat these early poets and seers must have been fools offeringimpossibilities to credulous listeners. By the rules of hisgame he must think Keats a fool for telling people that jocundday ever stood tiptoe upon a misty mountain-top.

The central clause is valid enough but it is insufficient toaccount for the facts. He says that myth refers to "theeternal nature and past acts of beings greater than man."

What is needed to complete it is an idea, as easily availableto Dr. Fox as it is to any other reader. It is to be foundthroughout the pages of the best and wisest teachers of thevarious systems that most of the beings greater than man,whose eternal nature and past acts form the body of myth, _arenone other than man himself._ The rest are man's adversarieshere upon earth.

Pythagoras is clear upon the point so far as Greek myth isconcerned. So is Empedocles and so is Plato. So also arePlotinus, Plutarch, Iamblichus and Proclus. Hermes



Trismegistus, the Egyptian, leaves no doubt of his belief thatmen are fallen divinities. The Hindu sages, Krishna, Gautama,and Sankara, taught it. So did the Chinese Lao Tse, Lieh Tse,Chuang Tse, Confucius, Chu Hse, and Wang Yang Ming. No onecan read the Gathas without recognizing it as fundamental inZoroastrian belief; the Sufis taught it, and so did theChristian Gnostics. It is in the Eddas, the Quran, and theKabalah. It is in our Christian tradition.

Why then, if it is so evident that all the myths deal with agolden age before the descent of the Divine Egoes, a bondageor enchantment here in the hands of the adversaries, and areturn again to our earlier home, do not modern mythologistsaccept it.

Because they do not want it. And honest use of theirscientific method would dictate that they report the phenomenaas they find them saying, these are the beliefs and althoughwe do not hold them, these foolish and credulous people did.They are not so honest, they repudiate the philosophy thataccompanies the stories and assign meanings they themselves

can believe. The only reason for thinking an ancient Mayancould possibly believe the ocean swallowed the sun at nightand disgorged it in the morning is that Sir Bertram Windle hadthe kind of mind that permitted him to believe the Mayancould.

Just as surely as the Christian apologists are pledged to thebelief that Christianity is the true light, so theevolutionary mythologists are pledged to the idea thatevolution is the only true theory of man on earth, and nomatter what the facts, they will bring in their predeterminedverdict. That man was once higher than he is and is now belowhis true place is a defiance of Darwin and Haeckel and

although you may say what you please about God, Darwin andHaeckel are sacred. Too many men have invested theirreputations in them.

Meanwhile, the contradictions involved in the life, let us sayof Dionysos, the heights from which he has come, thedegradations to which he has fallen and the heights to whichhe will again ascend, clear enough as Proclus explains him,must be modernly interpreted as the sap in the grapevine.Prometheus, the god who fell into the bondage of the earthforces, so revealing a figure in Aeschylus, must remain aprimitive savage who discovered fire; the Kumaras or celibateyouths who descended into half animal bodies to redeem them,

must have their interpretation in sex magic and taboo; theChinese men of old time who knew the Tao and lost it, must beunderstood as skin-clad barbarians of a pastoral age.

The key that would reconcile the contradictions and thus leadto a useful conclusion these mythologists reject because theydo not want the conclusion.

The fables of redeemers, understood in all the older faiths astypes and exemplars of man himself, of the ego of each of us,are "culture-heroes" and no more. The fables of Orpheus who



came clown into the place of shades for Eurydice, ofPersephone drawn down into the realm of Pluto, of Herakles whotoiled for the liberation of men, of Perseus who freedAndromeda from the sea-monster, of Theseus who defeated theminotaur, of Apollo who slew Typhoeus, of dismembered Osirisassembled and raised again, of the Greek Sons of the Sunbesieging the stronghold of the Sons of the Moon to freeHelen, Rama the Son of the Sun freeing Sita from the moon

host, Arjuna and his four brothers all the Sons of the Sundefeating the Kurus or Sons of the Moon. Vainamoinendefeating the evil magician Lemminkainen, the Volsungs toilingto save a lower race, are nothing but childish efforts of thedawn of human intellect to celebrate their tribal strong men?It doesn't seem reasonable. There is too much power in thestories. They have moved too many wise men of vision. Ifthey do not move mythologists to vision the implication isplain.

VIII. THE ETHICAL PROBLEM

We get our word `ethics" (through the latin _ethicus_) fromthe Greek _ethikos,_ that which pertains to ethos, character.With the Greeks the word ethos had other connotations. Itmeant custom, usage, native habit, and in its original sensecontained also the idea of an accustomed seat or place, ahabitat, or primal abode.

As a branch of philosophy ethics concerns itself with themeaning and scope of the words "good" and "bad", "right andwrong", as applied to character and to conduct. The first

phase of its enquiry is descriptive. It endeavors to classifythoughts, moods, and actions according to their goodness orbadness. In its second phase it determines, if possible,whether the common ideas of goodness and badness and right andwrong reveal any absolute standards of action, or point to anycosmic laws that govern the issues of conduct.

After many centuries during which ethics had been looked uponas purely philosophical in its subject matter and method,enthusiastic scientists of the nineteenth century made aneffort to bring it into the fashionable field of positivescience, but without notable success.

It should have been evident to the biologists who made theeffort that it must end in failure. It inevitably ends in aring-around-a-rosy. A science is necessarily experimental.Since the results of right and wrong action could beunderstood only by the experimenter and in his own person - toanyone else or in anyone else they would be mere opinion - hemust be, therefore, not only his own laboratory but also hisown judge of results, and he must judge by means of hisethical judgment which is the subject of his experiment.

Worse than this for practical purposes, it is the great defect



of all attempts at ethical experiment that the observableconsequences of actions are too far removed from their causesin point of time. Indeed the cycle of most important moraloperations does not fall within a single lifetime. This makesa positive science of ethics quite impossible for amaterialist or a theologian. If the experimenter is amaterialist he can have no assurance that the results willshow at all before the soul that produced the causes is

resolved again into the life force from which it came. Theresults of most of his experiments must therefore be lostentirely or must be seen in physical descendants, in whichcase the whole problem is transferred to the field ofheredity. An action that will only have its effect in a man'sremote descendant is not a matter of active ethical interest,especially if he does not expect to have a descendant. If theexperimenter has a predisposition for Christian dogma he is inan equally bad fix. The results of most experiments will onlybecome evident in Heaven or Hell and will not be naturaleffects on the doer but merely effects manifested in theapproval or annoyance of God. The only possible scientificexperimenter in ethics would be the theosophist who believes

in reincarnation, and he would expect the results to show in asubsequent life and would regard effects in this life asarising out of experimental conduct in previous ones. Hewould then have two courses of procedure, one would be to setup a cause and wait patiently for its result with thecertainty that by the time he reached his result he would havemislaid his memoranda of the cause. The other would be todevelop his memory of the specific causes in previous livesthat have given rise to present results. As we shall seethere is a simpler method.

It is now generally agreed that ethics had better remain abranch of philosophy.

Philosophy has been defined as "a process of reflection uponthe presuppositions involved in unreflective thought". Inother words the philosopher turns his attention upon himselfto discover how and why his mind does what it does and whatare the elements he has all along carried in his mind withoutthinking of them. He does not deal with new things but withold and previously unobserved things. He sets his ownprecepts, concepts and processes in new lights and examinesthem. He seeks merely to become more fully aware of himself.

In logic he examines the processes of reasoning. Inepistemology he seeks a theory of knowledge, endeavoring to

know how he knows and whence come his ideas. In metaphysicshe examines his apprehensions and his conceptions of space,cause, time, and substance. This is the enquiry into what theGreeks called the True - _aletheia,_ the unforgettable. Inaethetics he examines his ideas of the Beautiful - _kalos,_excellence of form and motion as embodying interior spiritualfunction. In ethics he examines his ideas of the Good -_agathon,_ that which is firm and secure.

In its first stages ethics is not a philosophy at all. Itdeals with specific problems such as any man might face in his



daily life. "What would be just in this case?" "What, inthat case, would excuse one from responsibility?" The powerto answer such questions is present with every Ego howeverlittle it may have been exercised. The power grows with use.Presently the first philosophical phases of the subject arise."Why, given similar cases, should there be so great differencein the answers given by different men?" "Why should theanswers vary at all?" "Or, why, indeed, should men, having

found an answer to a question proceed to do something contraryto that which they have decided?" "Why should men, desirousof following a certain wrong line of conduct justify theiractions by casting doubt upon the authority of the ethicaljudgment?"

Thus, out of its own contradictions and difficulties, ariseethics as a philosophy. After all it is natural that itshould so arise. Ethical philosophy is born of its owndisabilities as certainly as a study of health is born of thefact of illness.

All ethical systems belong broadly to two groups. There are

those that maintain that the intuitive power of judgmentpossessed by man is supreme, and a supreme guide to conduct.The others maintain, on one ground or another, that man'sethical judgment is not final but that there are other andexternal considerations which must guide his actions. Theseexternal standards vary. Herbert Spencer tried to erectstandards on biological data and failed egregiously.Christian theologians have tried to base standards on animputed revelation of the dictates of a personal God. Variouswriters have tried to found systems based on what they claimto be the universal acceptance of certain judgments, social,legal, or political. In view of the fact, however, that eachof these systems is finally tested by the author's own ethical

judgment and is addressed to the ethical judgment of those whoread or study it, we are forced to conclude at last that thereis only one valid basis for ethics, that of supreme power ofthe soul of man to decide between right and wrong. If a souldeciding for itself addresses to souls deciding for themselvesa system of ethics which declares that souls do not decide forthemselves, there is something wrong with the system.

One of the great controversies in ethics has revolved aroundhedonism. The hedonist bases his contention that pleasure isthe end of all human effort upon the universally experiencedfeeling that for a "good" to be good it must in some sense be"my good". The anti-hedonist offers the fulfilment of duty as

the true end of effort, arguing that the pleasure of theindividual can never be complete in himself.

A multitude of controversies have arisen also out of theologyand the effort to place the ideas of an omniscient God aboveman's interior judgment. The first fallacy of such anexternal standard for conduct lies in the fact that theethical judgment is itself superior to the idea of God. Manhas never been willing to worship a God who does not fulfilhis moral requirements. God is therefore inferior to whateverit is in man that makes ethical judgments. The folly of



thinking of a God greater than the maker of Him has led toinnumerable contradictions. The most noticeable in its effecton ethics has been that dispute to which I have referredbefore in these articles, the one about free will andpredestination. It is a dispute that never could arise in therealm of pure ethics at all because all the ideas of ethicshave to do with free choice between right and wrong and theinalienable right of man to will his own destiny. It is only

when theologians have managed to persuade men of the existenceof a personal deity who knows everything in advance thatanyone will consider even for a moment, the soul as bound to aroutine laid down in the mind-made God's foreknowledge.

The central problem of ethics, and the one with which I amespecially interested in this series of articles, is amystical one. It is the problem of the nature of thatmysterious quality in man that makes him the sole and finalarbiter of his relation to earth. The primary manifestationof the quality is tile operation of Will. The soul of manacts, it refrains from action. It approves, it disapproves.It judges. It may judge rightly or wrongly in any given case

but it reserves, for some high reason it does not itselfunderstand, the right to will and to judge.

Emerson's schoolboy with his book of history is in no awe ofNapoleon or of Alexander. He arraigns them for every thought,word and deed, he praises, he condemns serenely and withoutpassion. He is their equal, not of this earth but of a higherworld than this from which they all three have come. He isone soul appraising another and deciding what he would do -nay, will do - in like case, trying them by a higher criterionthan they or he can bring to actuality. So he judges allkings and saints and heroes. His judgments of the event maybe faulty, desires may disturb his calm; anger may sweep over

him or a chill of fear; his understanding may limp but fromhis height he decides. He and they are beings superior toearth, walking about fitfully and dimly remembering how Godsshould walk.

Plato, in common with all the great occult philosophers, foundin this high assumption a demonstration of the state of thesoul prior to its original descent into the bondage of earth.Lest I be accused of twisting Plato's doctrine to my needs letme offer a summary in the words of the late Dr. HenrySidgwick:

". . . If the objects of abstract thought constitute the real

world, of which this world of individual things is but ashadow, it is plain that the highest, most real life _must liein the former region and not in the latter._ It is incontemplating the abstract reality which concrete thingsobscurely exhibit, the type or ideal which they imperfectlyimitate, that the true life of the mind in man must consist;and as man is most truly man in proportion as he is mind, thedesire of one's own good, which Plato, following Socrates,held to be permanent and essential in every living thing,becomes in its highest form the philosophical yearning forknowledge. This yearning, he held, springs - like more



sensual impulses - from a sense of _want of something formerlypossessed, of which there remains a latent memory in the soul_,strong in its proportion to its philosophic capacity; henceit is that in learning any abstract truth by scientificdemonstration, we merely make explicit what we already know;we bring into clear consciousness hidden memories of a statein which the soul looked upon Reality and Good face to face,_before the lapse that imprisoned her in an alien body,_ and

mingled her true nature with fleshly feelings and impulses."

Sidgwick gives here the impression, frequent in modernphilosophical writings, that Plato's Reality and Good are theultimate Reality and Good. It is evident from Plato himselfand from the Neo-Platonists that they were only comparativeand that they do not in any sense embrace the entire scale ofknowledge, but only an octave above and beyond the presentoctave of mind, namely, that subtle but none the less materialplane the Eastern writers call Buddhi. It was the realm ofthe Christos in the Gnostic systems. This interior worldwhich the soul has lost, Plato and his followers regarded asone in which our now separated souls must be reintegrated into

a unity we once enjoyed but have lost owing to the delusionsof earth. The re-awakening of the soul of man is forPlatonists, a return to that Unity. This is the One ofPlotinos, and as I have already suggested, it is the One whichChristian theologians disfigured into their ultimate and all-knowing God.

Conceiving the race of men here upon earth as disintegratedand scattered fragments of that Unity, but essentially bound,each to the others, we have a clue to the truth about thatother great crux of ethics - duty. This is the one which Kantcalled the greatest of mysteries. It is the ethical factor wesaw the hedonist rejecting when he said, "That is not good

which is not _my_ good." The exponent of duty is a believer,however dimly he may see it, in the lost Unity, and he says,"Good can only be _our_ good." There can be no good whichomits any of the exiled race. They must go through together.

The concept of duty - that which one owes - is, then, ablurred recollection of the essential fact of existence in theOne. This is the only valid explanation of the constantlyrecurring intuition that can impel a man to an act ofsacrifice which he cannot justify by any process of mind.Hedonism is of the mind; duty is a reminiscence of the lostworld beyond mind, and mind has been called always the greatslayer of the real. The concept of justice is an archetypal

idea from that lost world, as are the concepts of love,philosophy, mathematics and the yearning for beauty.

The differences between the souls of men in this world arenot, therefore, to be explained as differences of developmentor as varying accretions of powers. They can only beexplained as varying degrees of loss of divine self-consciousness. This is the only adequate explanation of thedifferences in the clarity of ethical judgment. Failure ofjudgment does not come of inadequate development but of over-clouding. The will to act, the arrogation of the right to



decide are of the divine soul and are common to all men. Thefailure to judge wisely comes of the obscuring forces of analien earth.

IX. THE HUMANIST PROBLEM

The magnificent old word "humanist" is one which has knownmany vicissitudes and if the rising fashion is any index, itis likely soon to know a few more.

In its broadest and most general sense humanism denotes agreater preoccupation with the welfare of man than with theglory of God. It implies a realization that whatever God'sglory may be will be most efficiently enhanced by the serviceof God's creatures. Humanism is therefore an emphasis and anapproach rather than a theory, and is polar to theology andsacerdotalism, which tend to emphasize man's duty to an extra-

human and highly hypothetical Deity and to ascribe human joysand sorrows to the operation of His inscrutable will.

Of course humanism is as old as the human love which motivatesit, but, in periods of priestly ascendancy it is forced toflow underground. In Europe it has several times welled upinto a visible stream, once with Plato, once with theNeoplatonists, once with the Arabian philosophers who cameinto Europe with the Saracen invasion, and once with therebirth of Platonism at the Renaissance of the fifteenthcentury. It is with this last that the word is speciallyidentified, but like so many other words it has been parceledout among the seers of the parts of things and has been used

in limited senses. It is widely used to refer to thecultivation of classical (profane or non-Christian)literature; sometimes to mean any kind of secular learning.More recently Comte and his followers arrogated it as a namefor the Positive philosophy. R.B. Haldane and others haveused it to describe modern scientific advance. ProfessorsIrving Babbitt, Paul Elmer More and Norman Foerster haverevived it as a name of their kind of addiction to "politeletters" and abstention from anything that seems too modern,and have used it to describe a cold, intellectual gentilitywhich they pretend derives from Plato. In the past year or soit has become a cult name and seems to be in for a vogue thatwill defile it, just as the word "Theosophy" has been defiled.

It will then have to go back to the limbo of soiled words tobe reissued when men have forgotten the follies associatedwith it. To date, however, it is a clean, noble word.

Each of the great humanistic movements in Europe in historyhas had a direct theosophical origin. It has been theprojection into philosophy, religion, the arts, philanthropyand government of an idea which is fundamental in alltheosophies - the idea of the essential unity of mankind andthe consequent necessity for brotherhood as a means ofawakening the intuitions of interior divinity which are the



central object of effort in every theosophical system. Thisis the idea bound up in the word "Theosophy' itself. It isnot, as so frequently interpreted, merely Divine Wisdom. Anyreligious system purports to be that, and saying thattheosophy is especially so is no more than vociferation. Itis "the wisdom of the god", that wisdom which man may makemanifest by virtue of the fact that he has in the pastattained to a far higher measure of divinity than he now

displays. Or in another symbol, it is the Sophia, lost sinceour entry into this sublunary sphere.

It is easily demonstrable that no theology (Christian orother) can generate a vigorous humanism. Although Jesus, forexample, is a humanist of the first order, engaged in hislifetime in the task of humanizing Jewish dogma, thetheological accretions that have gathered about his doctrinehave inevitably destroyed the spirit of his work. The dogmaconcerning Jesus is that a Father in Heaven, of whom he is theextraordinary son and we the step-children, has sent us allinto the world and has known in advance the outcome of Hisaction and ours. Nevertheless this God requires of us that we

make a series of choices that His own foreknowledge rendersimpossible. Theology argues also that we can repair wrongchoices by an implicit belief in the disparity between us andJesus. It says that the outcome of this brief and futileperiod of choice - in which there is obviously no choice - isa return to the Father, Who will in Justice and Mercy, (notmanifested up to date) straighten out the whole intolerabletangle. With so muddled a theory of life and so optimistic atheory of death it is not marvelous that the central hope oftheology will be a return to the Father. The morecontradictory and confusing this God becomes the more surelywill He become theology's central fact.

The injunction of the theologian's God to be compassionate andto love one's neighbor as oneself is the addition of insult toinjury. Man is expected to do something God evidentlyoverlooked - in effect to transcend his God. In any case itis the history of theology that the people who have taken itsdogmas most seriously have been more concerned withpropitiating the Deity than with loving the neighbor. Themost logical adherents of the Christian dogma have felt withTorquemada that the best service one can render his erringneighbor is to despatch him to his God before he can do anymore damage to his soul's chance of happy return. The fear ofGod has always been the destruction of the love of humanity.

Science does better. Compelled by the strict terms of itsenquiry to confine itself to tangibles, visibles and audibles,it has to leave God - even an interior one in man - out of itsresearch. It has therefore no lofty ideal left but theservice of humanity. This service is, however, a trifle vaguebecause, so far as the scientist can see - as scientist -humanity has its origin in birth and its end in death. Beforethe one and after the other there exists only the vaguest sortof abstraction. So unless the scientist has unscientificinterior intimations to bear him up, he must pour all hisenergy and learning into a flux of forms that have visibility



but no meaning. Man is only demonstrably man while he is inthe body; therefore, he must argue, body makes man. Thebeneficiaries of the scientists' devotion have done nothing todeserve it, neither is there any certainty that they canrequite it, or even benefit greatly by it. In only a fewcases can they transmit it. This is a cold kind of humanism,and I doubt if any scientist with no wider vision than itimplies would ever go on with it. So while he is performing a

humanistic service, the theory of his effort is to be foundelsewhere. He can, just as easily as anyone else, be a manwho does the right thing for that wrong reason.

There is a third theory of life, increasingly widespread amongus today, immeasurably wider in its sweep than the notions oftheology and science, which might conceivably give a motivefor humanistic endeavor but which rarely does so. It is thatsystem of thought vaguely described as Hindu philosophy andpromulgated in India and the West by exponents of exponents ofthe Advaita Vedanta. Rarely has it been offered in anycompleteness. What we have is a syncretism drawn from the sixDarshanas or philosophical systems of India, better or worse

put together.

It starts, as all great philosophies must, with anincognizable First Cause, out of which arises the polarity werecognize as spirit and matter. The Absolute Cause manifestsand in the resultant ocean of being myriad centres ofconsciousness arise, each seeing the other apart from itselfand each under the illusion of I and not-I. These lives begina long pilgrimage from ignorance through successive stages ofself-realization to an ultimate full knowledge of theirdivinity.

So far there is no division of opinion. This idea of the

manifested universe and the flow of souls is common to allEastern system and to many Western ones. The modern Vedantin,however, assuming a simple and unbroken rhythm as capable ofexplaining all phenomena, and as reconciling allcontradictions, proceeds to deal with man as having mountedthe cosmic stair to the position we now occupy. The Vendantinwould say that our present mental consciousness represents ourfull stature, and that continuing on the wheel of evolution ofsoul powers and returning life after life to earth, we shallpass presently into a super-human condition and from that onto a higher, so step by step to the innermost. Many of ourown order, he would say, have gone on, becoming Mahatmas,Rishis, Arhats, and we must all become so in due course.

This is a great concept, greater by far than any generallyaccepted theory we have had in the West. It is greater thanour theology and greater than our science, but as a completehypothesis it has always been rejected because it does not fitthe facts.

The theosophical schools, of which the philosophies aredessicated fragments, refuse it. They say, "No.Unfortunately it is not so simple as all that." There isundoubtedly such an emergence from the Absolute, undoubtedly



such a cycle of outpouring and return. Undoubtedly also theevolution or unfolding of the powers of souls is the great lawof the Universe. Unfolding consciousness, however, requiresalso an increasing unfolding of will and the freedom tochoose. Whatever permits an individual or an order ofindividuals to choose permits a wrong choice as well as aright one. If a right choice can result in achievement, awrong one can result in failure. H.P. Blavatsky speaks of the

"necessity of failures even in the ethereal races of DhyanChohans".

The theosophist of any school would say, therefore, that manin his present state is not proceeding serenely in his ascent.Somewhere in the past he has made a choice which is nowimpeding his progress. And even if the theosophist had nomore to say about the nature of the choice and the resultingimpediments, there are enough indications around us everywhereto show that serious impediments do exist. The theosophistdoes, however, say more. He says that man - the Ego - is notat the full altitude to which his evolution entitles him, butis considerably below that altitude, and is the partly-

conscious possessor of powers more or less in atrophy. Thereis an order of beings evolving on this earth, a lunar race,but it is far below the stature of man. Man himself is makinga bad job of a redemptive act to which the law of theinterrelation of orders of beings has committed him and he isfor the most part doing his best to go counter to a law ofsacrifice which requires that he raise to the level of mind acreature who without his assistance cannot advance. Becauseof this failure to lift the animal soul, thereby establishinga rate of progression, that will permit him to rise himself,he is in no present process of evolution at all but in one ofstagnation. Indeed, in the cases where man is most obstinatein refusing his obligation, and uses the animal organism for

selfish and reparative magic, he is in a state of activedegeneration, with lower levels before him. His remedyagainst further descent is his memory of the lost wisdom.

Because evolution tends ever to unity, whatever memory werecover will be in terms of a level of unity higher than ourpresent one, a community in which the severances of man fromman have formerly disappeared and can be made to disappearagain by the exercise of brotherly love.

This is the theosophy of Veda, of Bhagavad Gita and theUpanishads, of the Orphic Mysteries, of Hermes and Plato, ofthe alchemists, the Rosicrucians, the Sufis, the Kabbalists

and of the occultists of the Renaissance in Europe. It isalso the theosophy of H.P. Blavatsky and her teachers, sodifficult for those who have become indoctrinated with thespurious Hinduism of recent years.

It is also the only "theosophia" which by any conceivable setof conditions can be "remembered" out of our past, as Platosays it must be, or attained by virtue of an earned divinitywhich all men possess.

These then are the two doctrines that can arise out of the



idea of the evolution of the soul. The one is that the soul isproceeding evenly on its way, that it has known nothing higherthan it now knows, and that every step is a new one. Theother is the same but with the modifying idea of the lapse, ofwhich Kant has said that it is fundamental in religion.

"That the world lieth in wickedness is a complaint as old ashistory, even as what is still older, poetry . . . All alike

nevertheless make the world begin from good; with the GoldenAge, with life in Paradise, or one still more happy incommunion with heavenly beings. But they represent the happystate as soon vanishing like a dream, and then they fall intobadness . . . Later, but much less general, is the opposite,heroic opinion, which has perhaps obtained currency only amongphilosophers, and in our time chiefly among the instructors ofyouth, that the world is constantly advancing in precisely thereverse direction, namely from worse to better . . . Thisopinion, however, is not founded upon experience, if what ismeant in moral good or evil, for the history of all timesspeaks too powerfully against it."

Of the two doctrines, one is a doctrine of ultimateachievement, the other a doctrine of immediate conditions.Each has its place in theosophy but whereas the Vedantin baseshis ethic on the ultimate, the theosophist bases his on theimmediate.

There is no humanism to be born out of the idea of orderlyprogression, because none is needed. It is a doctrine of_laisser faire._ If all men are coming out at the same goal- duly and in the course of the cycles - what virtue can therebe in fixing one's concern upon the pilgrims. If there is anymatter for concern at all it should be the goal.

Humanism can arise only out of the other, the realization thatthe Ego of man is one of a broken legion, in sore straits inan alien world, and must find his divinity in the restorationof the scattered host.

The line of demarcation between these two positions runsthrough all human thought and practice. Here are some of theconflicts.

Our Vedantin is the Pollyanna of metaphysics. His scheme isone of glad progress regardless of ethical choice. Allsuffering is a necessary part of the joyous plan. No matterwhat a man does, he is doing it for the unfolding of his

divine consciousness. The theosophists, on the other hand,have always said that believing this is a glad world isbegotten of what one wants to believe. It is not a gladworld. On the contrary it is a world of misunderstanding anddivision, of death and separation and loneliness, ofisolation, of tears and sorrow, of cruelty and distortedlusts, of the terror of little children at being born intoearth. Gladness is in spite of the conditions in which wefind ourselves. Gautama Buddha enunciated the doctrine of asad world out of which we must arise and the Vedantins callhim a pessimist.



The Vedantin says there is no urgency. Everything is workingout according to immutable plan. All beings must go forwardand all must achieve. What are a few scores of years in thesweep of evolution? What is the hurry? But turn to the greattheosophists - Gautama, Hermes, Krishna, Jesus. There is thewill of man at work in the world, they say, and the will ofman is not bound only to the good side of the immutable law.

It can be separative as well as unitive; it can do as muchevil as it can good. The servitor of mankind who goes toearly death, to the faggots and to the rack, who is persecutedin life and slandered in death, is matched by the vampire uponmankind who uses the bondage of the rest to feed his lust.The lovers of mankind find something urgent in man's state.Their world is a field of battle, and they are always too few.Every disciple who comes to them must come as a recruit toan army that never rests. Each enlistment must be an answerto the old question of _The Voice of the Silence;_

"Can there be bliss when all that lives must suffer? Shaltthou be saved and hear the whole world cry?"

The Vedantin argues that reincarnation into this earth isthe unalterable law, and then he undertakes to tell how toescape it. The theosophist says that reincarnation is anecessity only until we complete what we came here to do,then we may leave it, unless in compassion we return asteachers to liberate our brothers.

The Vedantin tells us of great time cycles and of a progressthat goes step by step with them. In an aeon we developthis power, in another aeon that; senses come into operationas the cycles unfold. Then if one asks him why anybodyshould exert any effort at all, why any man should press

forward, he will offer some cloudy nonsense about hasteningevolution, about speeding up the cycles, as if any mancould do that. If he could he would destroy all that iscyclic about them. He would abolish cycles. Theosophistsof all schools have, on the contrary, taught "a path toliberation in this life". They say, in effect, "Theseare not new powers you must steal from the cycles, butold powers you must restore, and you can restore themwhenever you will it."

The Vedantin speaks of powers gained anew. When he comes upona word like "restore" or "regain" he explains it as meaningthat all powers are latent in the Absolute and that to gain a

power is to draw on a previously existent one. He prefershowever to say "attain". The theosophist has always said"attain again". His words are "restore", "renew", "redeem","remember", "recognize", "resurrect", "religion", (itself thebinding back of something broken), "reunion with thecompanions of their former toil". The theosophist's figuresof speech are of prison-houses of the soul, of bondage, ofslavery, of deliverance out of Egypt, of liberation from thewheel of rebirth, of being raised from the dead, from thesepulchre, from the roofed-in cave, from the dark meadow ofAte. They are figures of finding a way out of a labyrinth, of



rousing a warrior from sulking in his tent, of rising superiorto despondency and going into battle, of rising from lethargyor from drunkenness, of turning from the cities of the plainand going up into the mountains, of forsaking the fleshpots.The theosophist talks of exiles, of wanderers, of prodigalsons who have wasted their substance in a far country, of sonsthat were dead and are alive again, were lost and are found,of Sophia tempted into the vices of the world, of Narcissus

falling in love with his image in the waters of desire, ofgods dismembered as Osiris was, of heroes like Odysseusfighting their way home over the raging seas of passions andhaving to do battle for their old heritage.

The Eastern metaphysician of unbroken rhythms and processeshas also - as he must have - a garden-hose theory ofillumination. He says our ideals and high aims come fromhigh, kindly beings in the world beyond us. But Hermes andPlato will not have it so. Hermes says, "This race, my son,is never taught, but when it wills it, its memory isrestored." Plato makes Socrates say, in the _Meno,_ "It is nowonder that she (the soul) should be able to recollect all

that she knew before about virtue and other things." And inthe _Meno_ also he says that the greatest of the things weknow, we learned before we were human at all.

The Vedantin has curious ideas about the power of the Ego togo on alone. If you perform austerities until you have shutout the world you can attain to a state in advance of therest. The great Compassionators agree that within limits youcan, but they say of one who tries it that he is a Pratyeka orEkashringa, which means that he is concerned only with oneperson - himself. Or they pity him and call him a rhinocerosBuddha - a Buddha of a thick and insensitive skin. There is,they say, by reason of his ancient effort, a previously

attained stature he can resume, but if he tries to do it thuswithout compassion, his nirvana is a condition of negation, ofrejection, as long as he can will it, of his bond with therest of mankind. The great restoration of the high onescannot be entered alone. It is a communal consciousness.

The Vedantin is amused if you talk of white and black magic.The greatest of the teachers have not been amused. Whitemagic is the return of union, black magic is the inevitablepole of severance from the oversoul and plays far too great apart in the struggle for the redemption of the race to beamusing.

The Vedantin says the soul cannot be destroyed or lost. Suchan idea is unthinkable. Divine essence lost? Spirit isindestructible, eternal. And so it is, replies Plotinos, butit is not indivisible. If the Absolute has divided into many,such as you and I also break up into many others. Spirit isindestructible but soul is only an integration and its presentintegrity is not secure. So we find the old teachers of Yogasuggesting that when a man thinks all he has to do is unitehimself with the Oversoul, he is flattering himself. Hisfirst task is to unite himself - to correct his own tendencyto disintegration. He must draw himself out of the multitude



of karmic forms into which he has poured his life and by whichhe is dismembered. When he has regathered his own fragmentsand become the Diamond Soul he may make the restoration of theUnity of which he is himself a fragment.

These are a few of the conflicts, all parts of the greatestbattle in human thought. Every lesser conflict stems off fromthese. What am I to do about my divinity? Shall I go on

alone and let the devil take care of the hindmost? This hasbeen the practice of Calvinism and of our Puritan sects. Orshall I find some metaphysical formula that will give me thesweet assurance that the hindmost are softly pillowed in theGreat Law and do not need my care? If I can find such aformula I shall have the gratitude of all the lazy, the rich,the top dogs, the feudal-minded, the people who profit by thedistress of others. The Brahmin and the Pharisee long agofound such a formula but they pay a heavy price. Some vitalcurrent in them stops, their austerities and taboos increaseand complicate, their philosophy becomes arid, circular andunserviceable. Filth, squalor and misery grow up around theirdoors, their world is peopled by pariahs, untouchables,

Mlechchas, through whom they must thread their way as they goto prayers. They must spend their lives avoiding the evilsthey have made.

Or shall I measure my spiritual altitude only by the number ofpersons for whom I have made myself responsible? This is theoriginal theosophy. It is also the original humanism.

"Where," I ask, hastening into rarefied spiritual worlds,"shall I seek God? The age old answer of the Humanists is,"Those broken fragments you fled from back there on the roadare the god."

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

Roy Mitchell was born in Fort Gratiot, Michigan, in 1884,of Canadian parents, and was educated in Canadian schools andat the University of Toronto (1902-1904). He spent thirteenyears in newspaper work in various cities in Canada and theU.S. During this time he was constantly in and around thetheatres as press agent, dramatic critic, and dramatic editor.In 1908 he became interested in experimental little theatres,

and for the next seven years he carried on such activity underthe auspices of the Arts and Letters Club in Toronto. In 1916he went to New York City to study theatrical design. He becametechnical director of the Greenwich Village Theatre during itsfirst year (1917-1918). In 1918 he went to Ottawa as Directorof Motion Pictures for the Dept. of Public Information, andfrom there to Hart House Theatre, University of Toronto, asits first Director (1919-1921). Hart House Theatre was anideal laboratory to test his theories of motion, mutablesettings and color systems described in the final chapters of_Creative Theatre,_ a book he wrote which has received high



acclaim for its basic knowledge of the theatre. In 1926 hewas married to Margaret C. (Jocelyn) Taylor, an artist andsculptor, who was a worthy partner in his work. In 1927Mitchell returned to New York City where he engaged inproduction, writing and lecturing. In 1930 he becameProfessor of Dramatic Art at New York University. While therehe developed a type of group singing based on phonetics, sothat folk songs of all nations could be presented in the

native language, although his superb Consort singers did notspeak the languages.

From the time he was a young man Mitchell becameintensely interested in philosophy, comparative religion andthe mystical meanings of mythology. Through the TheosophicalSociety in Toronto he studied these subjects in great depth,linking fragments from all sources to give him anunderstanding that is so well expressed in T_he Exile of theSoul._ He was an outstanding lecturer on these subjects. Thisactivity and the people it brought around him was his labor oflove. He died on July 27, 1944 while on a sabbatical leavefrom the university.

(from _Exile of the Soul,_ Davenport edition.)

_Exile of the Soul_ was reprinted by Blavatskyinstitute of Canada in 1949 and1981, as well as Mitchell'sother Theosophical works: _Through Temple Doors, a study inOccult Masonry;_ _Theosophy in Action;_ and _Theosophic Study- A White Lotus Day Address._

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